OTT Providers Taking Harder Look at Streaming Piracy

As streaming service providers start to take video piracy more seriously, they face big obstacles such as that pirates may offer services that rival the customer experience of legitimate ones, and that the financial cost of piracy remains a big question mark, experts said during a video piracy event Tuesday.

Over-the-top piracy prevalence was somewhat hidden by the aggressive growth streaming providers were enjoying, said Colin Dixon, nScreenMedia analyst. But in the past year, as some growth rates have slowed, more subscription VOD providers are looking at issues "that have been skating by under the radar," he said.

Traditionally, piracy involved copying and redistributing content; today pirates are sharing not just content but illegally monetizing it via their own advertising sales, said Sebastian Braun, Verimatrix director-product management. Also booming is "CDN leaching," where pirates gain access to an OTT provider's content delivery network and feed that content directly to their viewers through the video service's infrastructure, he said.

Braun said that due to the fragmentation of the OTT world, with numerous services each with its own exclusive content, piracy often ends up being the easiest way for consumers to get the content they want. He said streaming has very much supplanted torrents as the delivery system for most pirated content.

Estimates say there were 112 billion consumption visits last year to see unlicensed TV or film, said Piracy Monitor Managing Director Steve Hawley. He said roughly 10% of Americans have an app-based illegal streaming device in their homes.

Credentials sharing by OTT subscribers sometimes might represent inadvertent piracy. But industrialized piracy operations try to harvest users' personal information, banking on them often using the same passwords for the pirate sites as they do for others, said Hawley. He said different regions of the world are employing different tactics to tackle piracy. While companies in the U.S. use litigation to take down sites, law enforcement often takes the lead in Europe and the U.K., with Interpol and Europol often shutting down operations, he said. Some governments in the Asia-Pacific region have passed site-blocking legislation, he said.

Sports leagues are starting to include anti-piracy steps and content protection in overall content contractual deals, said John Ward, Friend MTS executive vice president-Americas. But there's no one vulnerability either at the broadcaster or content provider level, added Andrew Pope, Friend MTS senior solutions architect. "It's most places, unfortunately," he said.

The actual cost of piracy is difficult to quantify, and there needs to be more effort there since that data can then help develop countermeasures, said Ward. He said streaming video consumption and piracy grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, but some are now concluding piracy activity is reducing again while others say it remains elevated.

Securing streams of special events and other premium content starts with the recognition attackers will be technically adept and know the streamer's workflow, said Sean Flynn, Akamai director-security strategy and technology. He said the first step in planning should be documenting that workflow to see if there's adequate security. He said token authentication is one of the easiest first steps in protection. Friend MTS' Pope said watermarking content can help identify where anti-piracy efforts should be focused, but events like boxing matches -- which can be over quickly -- are a particular challenge for watermark-centric vulnerability tracking.