SPONSORED CONTENT
“There has never been more piracy. That is one of the biggest challenges that the industry faces,” explains Robin Boldon, Head of Product at Friend MTS.
“All the great content we have also means there more opportunity for pirates to get between rights holders and their audiences. And the days of politely sending a request to a service provider and keeping your fingers crossed that they will comply are long gone.”
Criminal activity thrives when victims are in isolation. Rights holders, recognizing this, are beginning to collaborate
“It is seen as a more collective challenge,” says Boldon. “Only a few years ago it was very much seen as the rights holders’ problem.”
Monitor, identify, disrupt
Friend MTS offers services to content owners with three main strategies of monitoring, identifying and disrupting. They help customers first identify who, where and what is being pirated by harvesting detailed data signals about each infringement. Knowing where to look is key and FMTS has built up a continuously updated “piracy source register”, a database of verified sources of online piracy.
These collected signals are then run through multiple analytics processes, from complex automated pattern recognition to expert human analysis, to look for various indicators that pirates may not even be aware they’re divulging. Once the suspected content is identified, video evidence can be extracted, and Friend MTS’s proprietary video fingerprinting technology is used to match
it with a known reference provided by the rights holder.
Obviously, this is a highly complicated, carefully orchestrated series of interventions. How long does it take to track down and process any one pirated video? Weeks? Days? Hours? Minutes?
“The process scales up,” says Boldon. “We’re actually processing more than three years worth of video every day. And this is all working in real time. To be effective, every second counts” isrupting the pirates includes everything from the aforementioned request to the service provider, but also intervening in the web of referrers and aggregators that point users toward the pirated content.
Tools also include domain and dynamic server blocking which can compel local ISPs to block access to verified forms of piracy with the ability to continuously update the location of the pirate’s infrastructure, avoiding the need to having to treat every new domain or IP address the pirate uses as a different legal application to a court or regulator.
Forensic watermarking, embedded when the content is first published, also allows for more precise identification of exactly where, when and how the content was first stolen.
“Rights holders are then able to take action while it’s happening. For a high-value sporting event, your success is measured in minutes, so it’s important to have these orchestrated approaches.”
But content doesn’t need to be a live sports final to demand the same kind of rapid response. A day-and-date release of scripted content can be subject to the same instantaneous attempts at piracy as a live event. Major damage can be done within hours or minute of the drop.
Coordination, not whack-a-mole
The best strategies for dealing with piracy are coordinated layers of defense and offense. If you’re playing whack a mole, chasing down potential offenders only as they pop up, you’re missing a lot of them, and wasting resources.
“The response is to be precise. Precision comes from your ability to capture the data around the different forms piracy and look for patterns. Our customers will have their own data points for legitimate content consumption, then when we can show them patterns that fall outside that, together we can build up a picture of the threats causing the most harm to their business.”
Good coordination includes not just the tech, but communication and intelligence-sharing between organizations. Friend MTS is regularly engaged in investigation and nd intelligence gathering, which helps them predict where and how content theft is likely to happen, particularly for major broadcast events, like the World Cup. This means they can even put potential offenders on notice before they strike.
“What we’ve found is that in certain situations, being proactive with some hosting providers yields better results. Rather than it being a tip-off that we’re onto them, they will comply, because they don’t want the negative publicity. But it still must be part of an overall multi-layered strategy.”
Fighting cybercrime is always an arms race. New techniques are regularly being hatched by agile and often well-funded criminal organizations for whom content piracy might only be one of a number of illegal revenue streams.
CDN leeching caught the industry on the back foot a couple years ago, but now thanks to robust investigation and knowledge sharing, a next generation of protection is being developed.
“In industry working groups and trade bodies, we’re seeing a more collaborative attitude between rights holders and licensees, with rights holders and partners talking more collectively about where insight can be shared and best practice can come into play.”
This content first appeared in the Autumn 2025 issue of ¡AU! Journal. Read more here.
