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Keeping an Active Eye on Piracy: How to Stop the Redistribution of Live Sporting Events

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By David Leporini, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Products and Security at Viaccess-Orca

“Is my content secure?” “Is my content service protected?” These are concerns that many of today’s content owners and distributors have, especially given the fact that new and increasingly sophisticated forms of video content piracy continue to impact the industry. In particular, the value of live sports content is seriously being threatened by pirates who are illegally rebroadcasting these events. The damage, from a revenue standpoint, can be devastating for content owners and distributors.

For instance, last year 1 billion people watched the final match of the world soccer championship final in Brazil, and an estimated average of 114.4 million people watched American Football’s big game, 2.2 million viewers more than those watching the game last year. When millions, and even billions, of eyeballs are tuning into a live sporting event on television, there are significant advertising and subscription dollars to be made and lost.

Some pirate sites are so professional-looking that advertisers and consumers aren’t even aware that they’re illegal; they simply believe they can enjoy ad-based Web portals or subscribe to a service offering lower prices with the same programing provided by legitimate operators.

What is the solution? Content owners and distributors need to enhance existing Conditional Access Systems (CAS) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) with security tools like active monitoring and watermarking, which are geared more toward stopping the redistribution of video content over the Internet. Here’s why: today’s pirates are capturing and redistributing video content online, after it’s been decrypted and decoded at the point of legitimate consumption, i.e., the TV or STB. Thus, traditional content security frameworks such as CAS and DRM are insufficient for stopping the redistribution of live sporting events.

Through an active monitoring solution, the operator can identify live re-streaming of pirated content in real time, anywhere in the world. It’s a multi-step process. First, the solution continuously monitors the operators’ content in order to detect where piracy occurs, the amount of piracy that is taking place, and where illegal redistribution is actually happening.

Once the nature of the operator’s piracy problems has been identified, the active monitoring solution can help operators take steps toward preventing piracy from occurring. These include sending legal notices to pirates to cease and desist, and using technical methods to prevent pirates from redistributing premium content.  In order to be effective, these efforts must occur during a broadcast in real time.

Finally, the active monitoring solution collects legal evidence about the pirates and their activities. The operator can then decide to use that evidence to take legal action.

I mentioned earlier that watermarking should also be a part of the solution against piracy. Watermarking can indeed be used to establish whether a particular piece of content has been pirated, and even identify the individual pirate at the origin of content redistribution.

Together, active monitoring and watermarking techniques can be used to complement existing CAS and DRM solutions. The result? Content owners and distributors can successfully mitigate the risk related to the theft of their intellectual property and protect their revenue streams, as illustrated in this infographic http://blog.viaccess-orca.com/industry/infographic-combating-tv-sports-piracy/


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