FEED Issue 08

33 ROUND TABLE Content Security

UFOM: We don’t have the financial resources of a huge sports network or movie studio. Can we still have access to the same quality of anti-piracy security as they do? RICHARD BRANDON, EDGEWARE: Protecting content is all about having control over your assets and media. Adding a unique bit-stream code into programming needs to be done on the edge of a delivery network. Watermarks can be added to programming at the origin for delivery through public networks, but they can’t be made unique. With that in mind and to really protect TV programming from pirates, operators need to invest in the right technology. The best way to control programming is by rolling out your own content delivery network. The cost of this isn’t actually as much as many expect it to be. Operators AS 4K BECOMES THE VIEWING STANDARD, IT’S GOING TO BECOME EVEN MORE IMPORTANT TO PROTECT PROGRAMMING

who rent space on a CDN as a service quickly reach a tipping point of a certain number of users watching so many hours of programming. After this it makes better economic sense to just deploy their own capacity – using cloud infrastructure if the demand is variable. NEIL SHARPE, FRIEND MTS: Global monitoring and subscriber watermarking is accessible to content owners with budgets below those of the largest sports networks and movie studios, although naturally there are some tools which are more geared to larger organisations. UFOM: How will content piracy develop over the next five years? What big challenges should we prepare for? RICHARD BRANDON, EDGEWARE: As definitions increase, the quality of pirated content – which is commonly degraded in quality – is going to improve. That means that as 4K becomes the viewing standard, it’s going to become even more important to protect programming, since degraded 4K is still good quality. ABDUL HAKIM, DPP: We’ll get peaks and troughs. As a result of new anti-piracy technologies, piracy will drop slightly, but then there will be countermeasures developed by the pirates. It’s always going to be this cat-and-mouse game. For example, currently there are vendors that are looking at artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect piracy. As they mature they’re going to start having an impact, but over time we know countermeasures will developed to overcome this, and newer techniques will need to be developed. And with the

continuous growth in online video, there will be new opportunities for pirates. The growth of niche sports for example. Previously pirates would have said, “Let’s just focus on the Premiere League, because that’s the most popular thing on the internet”, but now we’ve got the UFC, and we’ve got tennis, cricket, volleyball and esports. There’s a bigger marketplace for pirates to work in. NEIL SHARPE, FRIEND MTS: We’re seeing a number of key issues. Successful enforcement programmes have pushed pirates away from tier 1 hosts, and they are now using non-compliant hosts to a greater degree. Unfortunately, this can make traditional DMCA takedowns less effective. We’re also seeing an increase in peer- to-peer streaming, and this type of piracy is more challenging as there’s no single IP address to shut down. Again, this makes subscriber-level watermarking essential to revoke access to content. There has also been a significant increase in more sophisticated visual manipulation piracy attacks, like collusion, which involves trying to defeat watermarking by combining multiple video signals. These attacks are much more challenging than the typical masking and cropping approaches to content theft but they are still not enough to defeat highly robust watermarking services. Another key attack mode that is becoming more prevalent is OTT player interference to tamper with the subscriber ID. This demands additional security, such as higher levels of OTT player hardening, but this type of attack can still be contained with effective counter measures. UFOM: Thanks for your help. And keep watching the skies.

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