23 TECHFEED Content Protection
his time last year the industry was on high alert. Hackers had breached Netflix, Disney and HBO, threatening to release
script details or entire shows to the web unless ransoms were paid. Even then, Game of Thrones season seven was pirated more than a billion times, according to one estimate. In recent months no such high-profile incident has occurred – or at least been made public. The industry would appear to have stemmed the tide. This could be partly due to the firepower being thrown at the problem. Analyst Ovum estimates that the spend on TV and video anti-piracy services will touch $1 billion worldwide by the end of 2018 – a rise of 75% on last year. Increasing adoption of these measures such as DRM, fingerprinting, watermarking, paywalls and tokenised authentication will see losses reduce 3%, it predicts, to 13% in 2018 of overall TV revenues. Even at 13%, the revenue expected to be lost this year by global online TV and video services (excluding film entertainment) amounts to $37.4 billion. A report from Digital TV Research forecasts the cost of lost revenue due to piracy will reach an $52 billion by 2022.
Piracy – euphemistically known as content redistribution – is rife in sports broadcasting, too. At the start of the World Cup this year, Saudi TV channel BeoutQ was alleged by FIFA to be illegally broadcasting the opening games. Viaccess-Orca research, across 17 first round matches, recorded over 1 million views of illegal streams via Periscope, 3.1 million via YouTube and 7.5 million via Facebook. It identified the same top five ISPs hosting the sites used for streaming: two in the Netherlands (NForce and Quasi), Private Layer in Switzerland, Marosnet in Russia and Contabo in Germany. These illegal streaming links were not stopped by tracking services used by rights owners or TV operators.
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