CDSA

CULVER CITY, Calif. — Sam Bahun, VP of sales for the Americas at Friend MTS, dated himself a bit during the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit.

“When I started, Napster was the big threat,” he laughed, kicking off his presentation “Broadening the Spectrum of Protecting Live Content.” Today, it’s not a basement-dwelling teen stealing music via BitTorrent, it’s well-funded, well-organized, and tech-savvy criminals grabbing your sports streams and 4K movies and turning a profit off your IP.

To combat fraudulent streams, you need to identify their routes to get them terminated and do it in ways that drive consumers to licensed channels, away from the pirates. That takes the right tools, and quite a few of them.

“We’ve pioneered a lot of the technology and strategies that are used to fight piracy,” Bahun said, noting that $30 billion-plus worth of sports rights is protected by Friend MTS, along with 60 million-plus devices worldwide. And while “there’s no silver bullet for piracy, and many of us in this room wish there was,” he added, you can make headway against the threat of piracy with the implementation of a comprehensive, strategic security program.

Know your enemy, Bahun said: because content pirates almost always seek out the low-hanging fruit, employ a “comprehensive strategy that removes the easy” pirating options, allowing for a quick and effective response when that stolen stream shows up on social media. Watermarking on top of DRM, on top of global and regional monitoring, on top of dynamic server blocking (outside of the U.S., at least). Oh, and don’t forget your regular, independent security audits, to be sure everything you’re employing is up to snuff.

“You have to make sure you’re picking the right tools,” Bahun said. And that’s not all: coordinate with everyone along the supply chain and establish an incident response plan.

“Content security is not just about securing against illegal access,” he added. “The right content security tools can help engage … diverted audiences and transform content security from a cost to a revenue source.”

“Where Security and AI Collide” was the theme of the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit, the premiere gathering of the top security and asset protection minds in the M&E industry. The full-day event at the Culver Theatre in Culver City saw industry stakeholders mingle with counterparts, demo the latest offerings from top Hollywood vendors, and watch presentations, with an emphasis on the intersection of AI and security.

Produced by MESA, the Content Production Summit was presented by Fortinet, and sponsored by Convergent Risks, Friend MTS, Amazon Studios Technology, Indee, NAGRA, EIDR, and Eluv.io, in association with CDSA and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).