CDSA

Forensic watermarking such as NAGRA’s NexGuard, combined with a robust anti-piracy strategy, play crucial roles in protecting the content of media and entertainment organizations from pirates, according to David Wurgler, senior director of NAGRA Anti-Piracy and NexGuard.

“There is no technology in the world that can stop” pirates completely from distributing content they have stolen from an M&E company or legitimate online streaming service online, he said Dec. 16 at the Content Protection Summit (CPS) event, during the IP Protection breakout session “How Watermarking is Proven to Protect your Revenue and Fight Piracy.”

“The only thing you can really do is you can watermark your content so you have a chance of following the leak through the system,” he told attendees and those viewing virtually online. “Without watermarking, you have no way of finding out where that [leak] actually originated from…. With watermarking, you actually have a chance of stopping leaks at the source, which means you have a chance of closing the loop.”

A Trip Down Memory Lane

In the past, “everybody had one cable [TV] package and it was the same that everybody shared and [you] had subscriptions to all of it, and it gave you everything in one piece,” Wurgler said. Today, however, “that’s really not the case.”

The most recognized names in piracy today include The Pirate Bay, he noted. “But what really happened during the 2000s initially was that people started using direct download cyberlockers, peer-to-peer networks were huge… and it was a huge issue and everybody was trying to figure out how to fight that,” he pointed out.

“Of course, we didn’t really know that that was only the beginning of what was to come because, in the 2010s, we had all the web piracy and social media streaming,” he recalled. “All of a sudden, you could get any football game or sports event, you could get any concert or something like that – you could get it live. People were sharing content on Facebook” and other social media networks also, he said, noting: “That was a huge issue.”

Then, “after that, we saw the newest thing on  the block basically: subscription piracy online,” he said.

“Of course, we’d seen subscription piracy before, in the past, but these new services are really, really professionally set up,” he told attendees, adding: “They give you access to chunks of channels… but they also really have a professional outlook and it makes it super easy for consumers to actually be a pirate subscriber.”

Today’s COVID World

“So, where are we really today?” Wurgler asked rhetorically. “Today, we’re in a situation where consumer behaviors are changing and accelerating,” he said.

For example, “we see that basically people are moving a little bit away from theaters, stadiums and amusement parks,” he noted.

After all, he said: “It’s getting easier and easier to stay home and watch everything from home. So we all see that people are getting more used to using over-the-top services. They’re using more” video on demand (VOD) content and “consuming more content than they ever had before.”

At the same time, we are seeing more content being made available “easier and earlier to consumers than [it] used to be,” he pointed out. As a result, we now have “premium early window content, and that whole shift kind of drives the piracy problem a little bit because it makes content available online that used to be available only in cinemas before and it makes it a little bit easier for pirates to get that content distributed,” he explained.

“The contracting release windows leads to… increasing piracy risks,” he added.

Piracy is Everywhere

Noting that his company recently released a report, “Piracy Has No Boundaries,” Wurgler said: “What we’re really seeing today is that piracy is everywhere…. Pirates can distribute content everywhere. You have your content in your pocket. You have your content on the go. It’s on social media, it’s on the web, it’s on the TV, it’s apps, it’s playlists. You name it.”

Pirated content now is also “super cheap, it is super easy to get and you can get any piece of content anywhere, and that’s really the big issue”: that “there really are no boundaries for piracy,” he said.

That is also why he said “we’re seeing a development in piracy that we really don’t like,” which is an “increasing race in the indexes that we have created to follow piracy.”

For many consumers, piracy is becoming what they see as a “great alternative to legal services,” he noted.

A large percentage of people in the piracy ecosystem are young consumers. That “means the piracy issue is not going away [and is] more likely to grow because [there are] generations that are growing up understanding and being used to piracy,” he said.

The main reasons that people are giving for using piracy include that it’s “free and it’s easier to find content,” he noted.

It is important for the M&E industry to make sure fewer people are lost to piracy because the more people lost to piracy, the greater the risk there is of “losing them altogether from the industry,” he warned.

According to the findings of a study that his company recently did, 30 million individuals and 9 million households are using a pirate IPTV subscription in the U.S. alone, he told attendees.

The study also found that 3,500 storefront websites, social media and stores within online marketplaces sell pirate subscription IPTV services to the U.S. market, he said.

The industry can’t ignore the problem because “that number is just going to grow,” he warned.

There are pirate subscription video services that cost less than $100 for a year, which is “very cheap but the content is good and the quality is high,” he noted.

A study recently came out in Europe indicating piracy was on the decline. The problem with that, he explained, is when somebody has a subscription to a pirate service, “you don’t go online to look for more piracy because you already got it, which means that you can’t really judge piracy on just how much [people are] watching or how much visible piracy is out there.” It’s just like only seeing the tip of the iceberg and thinking there isn’t much ice there, he noted.

The New Normal

“That’s why we think subscription piracy is basically becoming the new norm for consumers and socially accepted as well,” according to Wurgler. “And that’s the big issue. We need to make sure that piracy is not socially accepted because, if it is, then it’s going to be even worse going forward,” he warned.

New U.S. legislation has helped but piracy remains an issue, he went on to say.

One factor is that it is often very difficult for the average consumer to see any difference in quality between a pirated service and a legitimate one, he noted.

Where is the pirated content coming from in the U.S.? The main source are the over-the-top (OTT) services, mainly because they are easily available, cheap and the quality is very good, he explained. In Europe, the main sources are boxes and other types of services, he added.

There are challenges in the traditional ways in which the industry has fought piracy, including monitoring, collecting data, capturing pirated video, sending out Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices and then moving to shut down servers when the pirates ignore those notices, he told attendees. For example, some jurisdictions don’t honor the results of lawsuits. Taking down servers, meanwhile, has a weak success rate.

The best way to fight commercial pirates, he explained, is to have labs that can install the pirated services so you can understand them and learn how they work and see what type of infrastructures they have.

The “Key Element”

“But really a key element to all this is watermarking,” Wurgler said. “It gives you certain options that you didn’t have before. Now, you have a chance to shut down the source.”

An organization can identify the watermarks and revoke streams so there is no access to it for the pirates, he explained. You can also use the knowledge you gain from the watermark to help build legal actions and also time your actions to disrupt the pirate service at a critical time for the pirates, he added.

After all, subscription piracy is meant to serve as an alternative to legitimate services but that changes if the pirate service isn’t dependable anymore. “If they’re not stable anymore, then the value decreases drastically for the pirates,” he pointed out.

It’s also not hard to implement watermarking with OTT services, he noted. He also went on to point out the main values of watermarking for VOD and live video content.

For VOD, watermarking protects the value of prerelease content and protects the integrity of distribution, he said. For live content, watermarking enables the takedown of the source and can be “harvested” for future actions, he added.

His final recommendation was to “turn these challenges into opportunities” including monetization.

To download the presentation, click here.

To view the full presentation, click here.

The Content Protection Summit was open to remote attendees worldwide using MESA’s recently introduced metaverse environment, the Rendez.Vu-powered MESAverse, an interactive 3D-world that allows for hybrid live and virtual events.

The event was produced by MESA, presented by IBM Security and Synamedia, sponsored by Convergent Risks, Richey May Technology Solutions, PacketFabric, archTIS, Code42, INTRUSION, NAGRA, StoneTurn and Vision Media.