CDSA

Digital rights management (DRM) is crucial for organisations to properly protect their content but it alone is not quite enough, according to Simon Hanna, regional VP for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at security services provider Friend MTS.

It is crucial to implement content protection solutions that range from content monitoring, fingerprinting and watermarking to enforcement and IP blocking in a collaborative effort to protect live and video on demand (VOD) assets from illegal re-distribution, he pointed out June 29 during the breakout session “Collaborative Content Protection Strategies for the Complex Global Media Industry” at the Content Protection Summit Europe (CPS EU) event.

“We know consumption of content is going through the roof, particularly” over-the-top (OTT) content, with numbers in the billions of dollars annually, he said.

“The number of services is growing dramatically” also, he noted, adding: “It seems there’s new services coming online every month and, not surprisingly, the pirates want a piece of the action. They want some of those revenues.”

Many people want to either access content for free or at least at a lower cost than it is via legitimate services, he said, explaining piracy is “about monetising other people’s content for profit more often than not.”

Revenue for the pay video on demand (VOD) industry, especially subscription VOD (SVOD), has soared in the past decade from 388.8 million euros in 2010 to 11.6 billion euros in 2020, according to third-party data provided by Friend MTS. The number of global SVOD subscriptions is expected to reach 1.5 billion over the next five years.

Illegal re-transmission of live sports is growing specifically, resulting in billions of dollars lost by rights holders, Friend MTS pointed out.

“Piracy is a huge business,” Hanna said, with more than 17 percent of global video streaming users accessing content illegally, according to Friend MTS. Content owners, rights holders and distributors stand to lose potentially billions of dollars in revenue each year as a result, with losses in subscriber and affiliate license fees, ad revenue and on demand revenue.

As a result, staying ahead of the game in this ever-changing media landscape is even more important now than ever and there are several measures you need to take and problems you need to be aware of as a service provider to prevent people from stealing your content, according to Hanna.

“The law, as always, is behind,” he said. “But the problem is now starting to get the ear of the people that matter, particularly in the sports arena,” he told viewers.

Sports, after all, “drives a lot of the ecosystem within television” and, as a result, in piracy also, Hanna said. “Some legislative measures are starting to come into place,” he noted.

For example, the EU Parliament recently voted to introduce new legislation to protect sports rights holders, but “service providers really have to take the lead here and make sure that their content is secure,” Hanna argued.

Some viewers may only access a small amount of free content “here and there” because they do not want to pay for another service, he noted. But piracy is “obviously not a victimless crime” — it has an impact throughout the media and entertainment sector, he said, explaining: “It impacts the content owners who are looking to license content downstream. It impacts the service providers themselves who are losing subscriptions. And, of course, even the advertisers.”

And “pirates will always do what’s easiest in order to access your content,” he warned, adding: “As a service provider, you need to understand both where the vulnerabilities are in your platform [and] also where are the pirates actually exploiting those vulnerabilities to capture your content and then focus your efforts accordingly to counter that.”

In the ongoing battle against piracy, the “key technology is DRM,” he told viewers. Friend MTS is not a DRM provider but works with several companies that are, he noted.

“DRM for many years has been considered a bit of an optional extra — maybe do it if you can,” he told viewers.

But, “really now, we would say it’s just best practice,” he said, adding: “If content is worth stealing – if it is valuable enough that people will steal that content – it should be DRM’d. The truth is if it’s not DRM’d, you’re effectively putting it out free to air and there’s nothing a pirate will like better than free-to-air content because they have to do nothing to steal it. All they really have to do is manage a link to their subscribers to point them at your content that’s not really protected properly. And the unfortunate truth is then, as a service provider, you are paying the pirates’ distribution costs. The more the pirates get people to look at that content, the more you’re paying them to do it.”

But DRM is just the first step in a multi-prong security process to protect content, he noted. There are other security mechanisms to consider around distribution, including content delivery network (CDN) tokenisation, he said.

An organisation needs to “ensure that content gets to that end device securely without being compromised,” he stressed. When content reaches that end streaming device, “this is really where the bulk of commercial piracy happens,” he warned. Re-streaming piracy is a major concern, he said, noting pirates will often capture content from places such as an HDMI output or “they’ll simply screen scrape it from a desktop.”

He went on to warn viewers: “It doesn’t matter how much you spend on your DRM” or set-top boxes: “You can’t stop people doing that but at least you’re forcing the pirate to put some effort into it — to take on some costs themselves — and also then there are things that we can do to identify those users whose accounts are being used to steal that content.” Service providers can then take action, including, when needed, against subscribers such as by cancelling their accounts, he noted.

To protect content today, advanced subscriber-level watermarking, combined with monitoring, is necessary, he told viewers.

There are several requirements for high performance watermark, Hanna went on to say. For one thing, the watermark must be imperceptible to viewers or it risks interfering with the viewing experience, he pointed out. It also becomes useless if the pirates can see it, he noted.

Additionally, he explained: Watermarking must always be on during playback of the protected content; “we should be able to pull the watermark out in a limited amount of pirated video” or it’s too costly and ineffective; it must be “robust” and resistant to real world attacks currently in use; and it must be deployed across all device categories, including legacy ones, Hanna said.

There are three types of Friend MTS ASiD watermarking solutions: ASiD embedded; ASiD OTT client-composited (the most popular one with OTT services); and the newest one, ASiD OTT Edge-switched, he pointed out.

An ASiD case study proved that these solutions work, he told viewers. One Tier 1 broadcaster Hanna did not name was able to reduce sports piracy on its OTT service within just days of deploying ASiD OTT watermarking and global monitoring, he said.

Friend MTS offers a full range of other tech solutions, including distribution ID watermarking, global monitoring and fingerprinting, he added.

One other important takeaway: “Collaboration is key for the media industry to defeat piracy,” according to the company.

Content Protection Summit Europe was presented by Convergent Risks, with sponsorship by Richey May Technology Solutions, Synamedia, BuyDRM, Friend MTS, NAGRA, and X Cyber Group.
The event was produced by MESA, CDSA, the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH), under the direction of the CDSA board of directors and content advisors representing Amazon Studios, Adobe, Paramount, BBC Studios, NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, WarnerMedia, Amblin Entertainment, Legendary Pictures, and Lego Group.