CDSA

Video piracy continues to have a major impact on consumers, media industries, the Internet and on technology, according to Steve Hawley, founder and managing director of Piracy Monitor.

“Everybody knows about piracy,” he said Oct. 19 during “The Forms of Video Piracy: There’s a Taxonomy for That,” the opening session on day one of the first Video Security Summit.

“They hear the word all the time and most of the conversations that I get into about piracy seem to focus on one or two pieces of technology” that are being represented at the two-day summit.

“Piracy really takes a number of different forms,” he said, noting the six major forms of it are: Theft of movies and other content, services (such as Netflix), infrastructure, devices and software, advertising, and “theft of you” in which pirates steal your money, financial information and even processing power from your computer.

Citing a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study from 2019, he noted that $29 billion were lost to the U.S. economy alone in 2018 due to global piracy. It’s a study still widely cited but probably dated.

“You can argue that it has gotten a lot worse in lockdown and COVID but that [$29] billion isn’t just video and it isn’t just content,” he explained. “It’s also the revenue and the economic power generated by creative professionals, by distributors, by people contributing to the production of video content.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, “I think it’s no secret to everyone that people were in lockdown; they watched a lot more TV,” he noted. Indeed, there was more than a two thirds increase in Americans watching video during lockdown and it “doubled in England,” he said.

One fifth of Americans, meanwhile, admitted they visited infringing websites and illegal streaming services, according to a recent Digital Citizens Alliance survey, he pointed out.

As just one standout example, he said a whopping 91.3% of the consumption of the 2021 theatrical film release A Quiet Place Part II was through unlicensed streaming sites. “It’s an enormous problem,” he added.

Video piracy can happen when content is distributed over the open Internet or via a managed network, he said, noting there are digital rights management (DRM) online and conditional access for pay TV to traditional set-top boxes that provides some degree of protection.

“But before the content gets to that environment, there’s no protection” and, “after the content is played, there’s no protection,” he pointed out. “So there’s nothing stopping, for example – or at least in the old days, before anti-piracy started to take hold – there really were no protections for content after it was played and it could be captured and redistributed.”

Vulnerabilities “can be really anywhere,” including at the studio, he went on to say. “Somebody could be monitoring distribution for legal distribution, store it and then restream it.” For example, there are devices and software that can intercept legal programming for redistribution, he noted.

Why should video providers care? For several reasons, he explained: to retain revenue, for contractual and cost considerations, as well as for reputation protection.

“Sports leagues have very stringent requirements these days to protect their content,” he noted. “Distributors also have very stringent requirements of their suppliers to make sure that their suppliers can guarantee that they’re the exclusive distributors. And if somehow their content is stolen then, suddenly, their exclusivity evaporates.”

A Pay TV operator, meanwhile, “may have to over-engineer or over-provision my network just to accommodate pirate traffic that I know is there but I also need to guarantee quality of service and quality of experience to my legitimate subscribers – so you have to overspend to do that,” he explained.

Reputation protection is important for advertisers especially. “If ads are played over non-legitimate, infringing environments, it could reflect badly on the reputation of the advertiser, especially if that fraudulent environment is an avenue to deposit malware on your consumer’s device,” he said. After all, “they can come back and blame the advertiser, who may not even know that the advertising is there on the infringing service,” he said.

So how do you fight piracy? By taking technical and non-technical countermeasures, he told viewers.

Technical measures include:

• Enforcing service parameters (business rules)
• Traditional multiscreen security (DRM and Continuous Application Security)
• Usage monitoring and analytics
• Content identification
• Network test and source verification
• Service administration

Non-technical measures include:

• Marketing (consumer-facing offers)
• Consumer education (risks, personal steps)
• Online partners (distribution, search, social)
• Financial partners (anti-fraud)
• Industry partners (M&E peers and industry organizations)
• Governmental (law enforcement, regulators)