CDSA

Industry Experts Explore the Importance of Content Protection and More

When it comes to operational challenges, it is critical for a media and entertainment organization to be prepared and have the right tools and workflows to manage operations – and that includes having robust content protection layers in place to secure the organization’s revenue and brand.

Content protection and anti-piracy initiatives are crucial for premium content, especially live sports because of the high production and licensing costs involved. To protect those large investments, rights holders must ensure solid content security is a key part of their strategy and operations.

Digital rights management (DRM), watermarking, monitoring and enforcement solutions need to be implemented to have both a lock on the front door, so to speak, and the remedial solutions when content gets stolen to be able to take down illegal streams quickly, a panel of experts who have been part of supply chain operations said during a recent OTT.X event in Los Angeles.

“Being prepared and having the right tools and workflows to manage operations is so critical in today’s day and age,” moderator David Chu, EVP and GM at Cinedigm Networks, said during a panel discussion.

Noting that Friend MTS is a “pioneer and global leader in content protection and anti-piracy services,” Mike Baron, its SVP of sales and strategy-Americas, said: “We really work across all the stakeholders, content owners, broadcasters, [and] operators with advanced security solutions, forensic watermarking, fingerprinting, content monitoring and legal enforcement, and then, [provide] business intelligence.”

What Friend MTS does is “ultimately … we disrupt real world piracy, which is a multi-billion dollar issue within the industry,” Baron said.

Chu pointed out that, “in today’s streaming world, you really can’t compete unless you have really large content libraries.” He asked Kira Baca, chief revenue officer at Rightsline, to explain how important is it to have the right content rights management solutions.

The Crucial Issues

“When you think about rights,” she replied, it is important to have the “information, the Bible, whatever you want to call it, that tells you what you can and can’t do with it.”

She explained: “You really need to think about having a solution that provides [the] information that can consolidate it because I think one of the biggest challenges across media companies, whether they’re large or small, is going to be having information stored in different systems, in spreadsheets, in somebody’s desk. We’re certainly getting further away from the physical aspect of how people keep information. But, in the digital age, we’ve taken some of those bad habits into the workplace.”

What is crucial is having “one source of truth,” she said, adding: “You can talk about catalog. You can talk about creating content or acquiring content. But you need to make sure you have it stored in an easily accessible single source of truth for the content that you ‘own’ or have licensed and are going to put onto your service.”

Once you get past that, she said: “Ideally that solution is interconnected. And that’s one of the points I was looking forward to expressing: That we live in a modern technology age where solutions are now competing on the ability to connect to other systems and the importance of that is going to be your time to market.”

At the end of the day, “if you’re acquiring content or making content or putting content out, your only real goal, if we just get down to, you know, the brass tax, is to execute a strategy to make money,” she pointed out. “Everyone’s putting this content out to make money for it in one capacity or another. Whether that’s ad revenue or subscription or still direct-to-consumer, the ability to do that and maximize your revenue is going to come [down] to that time to market.”

Summing up, she said: “It really starts with making sure you can get the information clearly that outlines your best path to your strategic goal, which is to maximize your revenues.”

Excel Won’t Do

“I know coming from a startup world and building” over-the-top (OTT) streaming channels, “once you have a good amount of content, you need a content rights management system,” Chu went on to say.

“You can’t get away with this on Excel spreadsheets or things like that. You have to protect those rights very carefully,” he noted.

But, “in this digital age, piracy has always been around and it’s rampant,” Chu pointed out. YouTube, the largest video platform in the world, has “sophisticated copyright management and identification tools,” he noted.

Protecting Sports Rights

But Chu said: “For other streamers and broadcasters and pay TV companies, live sporting [events require] enormous sums of money to license sporting rights and to protect those rights to ensure there’s no piracy.”

He asked Baron to provide some insight into how his firm works with networks and streamers to provide those “important layers of protection.”

This is a world where sports rights, “particularly live sports rights, are exorbitant and the investment is so large, but it’s also perishable in the sense that you watch it once,” Baron replied. That content can’t be “replicated so you have to protect it” very carefully, he noted, adding: “What we recommend [is] really taking a proactive approach [and] futureproofing your content.”

And what that means, Baron explained, is that from “the point of planning, you want to have a solid” DRM solution. “You want to watermark, you want to monitor, you want enforcement, you want to enable these safeguards.”

If content is pirated, an organization must “have a remedy to defend against it because, if you don’t and once that cat’s out of the bag, you’ve lost the game for all intents and purposes,” Baron warned.

Also crucial: “Understanding your platform,” he said, explaining: “You want to be able [to] audit your platform to understand your vulnerabilities.” After all, media companies want to keep their revenues flowing in and maintain their subscriber bases and avoid churn and, if the content is available from pirates for free, it’s harder to achieve those goals, he warned.

Localization Challenges

When it comes to localization, Craig Seidel, CTO at Pixelogic Media noted that “there’s a lot of steps” that content companies must follow. While dialogue is important to keep in mind for localization purposes, “you might also need laughs and grunts,” he said, adding descriptive subtitles are crucial. He pointed to the importance of catering to deaf and hearing impaired viewers.

Dubbing and subtitling “has to be done in territory,” he cautioned, explaining: “If it’s not being done in territory, watch out because, people get stale on the local idioms and sayings and so forth…. If people aren’t local, they’ll tend to use terms and so forth that just sound weird when playing locally and … the more specific you can get the better.”

When it comes to distributing content globally, being careful with ratings and content that may be deemed to be offensive in certain markets must be considered, according to Davinder Luthra, global digital leader at Spherex.

“All the governments and the regulators in the world care about how consumers are acting and react to the content that’s being presented in their local homes or in their cinemas or on their DVDs and their Blu-rays,” Luthra said.

Content companies can’t just treat all Latin American countries the same when it comes to potentially offensive content and ratings, he stressed. “You can’t just sort of treat it as a block. There’s 30 countries. There’s very significant, important digital markets: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and so on.”

More than ever, content owners must have the “right tools and workflows and systems” to deal with those issues, whether for streaming or other forms of distribution, he said.

“They need to have synopses, artwork and local ratings and all the rest of it … because you need to allow for parents to make informed choices, protect children from harm,” he said.

“And at the end of the day,” it is also to “protect your brand,” he warned, noting it is a “complicated operational problem” and the “best way to solve that is to really understand what’s … the main kind of classifiable events inside of your content,” including how much alcohol, drugs, violence, sexuality and profanity are in it.