Payal Kapoor

The Golden Age of Streaming — the era that the Economist magazine is calling a “$650 Billion Binge” — is just starting. Shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Transparent have ushered in a new generation of entertainment marked by its large numbers of international viewers and acclaimed programming. In 2019, subscriptions to online (OTT) video-on-demand services around the world amounted to 1,072,000, surpassing cable by far with 613.3 million subscribers. The OTT VOD subscriptions are expected to rise to 1,129,600 in 2020.When it began, cord cutting was easy and less expensive. Those who dropped their cable TV to go with Netflix and Hulu were few and far between. Now, the large numbers of consumers who are streaming is attracting big-name players like Disney+, Apple TV+, Comcast’s Peacock, and AT&T’s HBO Max, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal — all challenging the predominance of Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix.  More and more it’s shaping up to be a race for market share in an increasingly crowded arena. Not only are consumers finding their viewing experience more fragmented and costly, OTT streaming service operators are experiencing more security challenges.

When looking at digital rights management vendor, like any major vendor, one of the first things to investigate is how they’ve coped with similar clients. Not only will this give an insight into how they go about their business but also how they deal with various enterprise sizes. Scalability is much talked about but hard to implement and finding a digital rights management vendor with proven abilities to scale up rapidly and meet live event user bursts is crucial. Intertrust’s experience with major clients such as Italy’s Tivu, Britain’s Youview and France’s TF1 has proved our digital rights management platform’s ability to handle subscriber bases into the millions and beyond. When choosing a digital rights management vendor, another important deciding factor is what the major film industry players think. The big Hollywood studios demand enhanced security to guarantee the protection of premium UHD/4K content. The compliance with these specifications, advanced copy protection and ability to encrypt content along with our forensic video watermarking are among the reasons why all major Hollywood studios have accepted our DRM system for their digital content. Moreover, operators using our DRM are in a favorable position to negotiate content licensing agreements with these studios, since all content rights will be preserved and protected.

Content piracy is so big that its impact is felt beyond the bank account — it’s changing business models. Traditionally in the movie business, new releases often stayed in theaters for months to maximize revenues. As digital downloads, and now streaming, have made it easier for content pirates to obtain and distribute illegal copies, movie studios have continually shrunk the release window over the last several years, moving to get their latest blockbuster online before pirates gain traction with their illegal copies and eat into ROI. With secondary release windows now down to weeks (or even less in some cases), studios must focus on protecting their investment inside and outside the theater. Looking beyond entertainment, the growing popularity of live over-the-top (OTT) sports is prompting many cord-cutters, out of home viewers, and those without local access to view their favorite teams, to turn to piracy sites — sometimes unwittingly — to keep up with the action. As noted in our previous piracy research blog post in this series, 54% of millennials admitted to researchers to having watched illegal streams of live sports – one-third of them regularly. Unlike pirated TV shows or movies, the value of a sporting event is fleeting, with revenue being lost in a very small window. If stakeholders aren’t fighting piracy in real time and in collaboration with others across the delivery chain, losses can increase rapidly. With more and more fans streaming their favorite live sports, the cost to obtain streaming rights for the world’s top leagues is rising, spurred by competition from new media (non-broadcast) companies such as Twitter, Amazon and new direct-to-consumer (DTC) subscription services like DAZN. Verizon paid over $2 billion for the non-exclusive right to live-stream most National Football League (NFL) games to their mobile customers over a five-year period through the 2022-2023 season; and DAZN has been winning streaming rights all over the world — from the J. League in Japan to the EuroLeague and the NTT IndyCar Series in Brazil. As more streaming sports services emerge to meet the demand for legitimate OTT viewing, the cost of piracy to rights owners will climb along with it.

The most significant piracy ecosystem threat today comes from an open software platform that operates under the Kodi brand. Kodi is a completely legal initiative and can be installed on various devices to deliver a unified experience, similar to Chromecast or Apple TV, but without the restrictions imposed by those systems. Unsurprisingly, the ease-of-use and popularity of Kodi boxes translate to Kodi accounting for 95% of the illegal live consumption in North America. In our blog post An Anti-Piracy Security Strategy for Live Sports Content, we discussed the principles of video watermarking as an essential tool in the battle against live streaming piracy. Watermarking is an important complement to DRM, and the two work together to protect content before and after rendering on the viewer’s device. Further complicating matters is the fact that pirates are constantly coming up with ways to defeat the effectiveness of watermarks, even when undetectable. Recent approaches to attacking watermarking effectiveness include intermittent blurring, chopping off the top and bottom of the screen, and combining multiple streams of the same piece of content into a single stream through a process known as collusion.  Another technique involves obscuring the source identity through direct penetration of the distributor’s client app. In such cases, the watermark remains intact but becomes associated with a phony ID. 

In the world of live sports watermarking, speed is king, and that applies to video watermarking as well. The key advantage to ASiD OTT client-composited watermarking for use in live sports is its speed. Time to detection of content theft can be as little as a few seconds. With current technology, organisations involved in the broadcast of live sports must protect content worldwide, in real time (remember that content thieves act without physical borders). In contrast, A/B variant video watermarking could take many minutes. This timeframe can make a world of difference to content pirates in live sports, where actions and results can happen in a matter of seconds.  Beyond rightful owners losing an enormous amount of revenue, content piracy in the live sports world is a direct threat to sports teams’ sponsorship deals. Because sports organisations are unable to include pirated audiences in their audience estimates, the numbers of viewers are grossly under-reported. These groups stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars – more – for every game or match, since audience size is a key basis for sponsorship deals.  

This approach enables OTT drm streaming service providers to grant access to content distributed to different customers/different devices by delivering only the DRM licenses with CEKs for the authorized resolutions based on the consumer’s subscription package. Also, this allows the streaming service operator to fine-tune the DRM policies for each given resolution or track. For example, audio and SD content may not require enforcement of HDCP over an HDMI connection. However, an HD resolution may require HDCP 1.4 to be enforced, and 4K/UHD may require HDCP 2.2 to be enforced in the DRM license. We will cover additional considerations related to the use of HDCP in article four of the How to Trust Your Player series. Using the right DRM security level allows OTT streaming service providers to map the required security level for each given resolution or track. For example, audio and SD content may only require a “software-based DRM client,” whereas HD and 4K/UHD may require a “hardware-based DRM client” to be enforced. In the case of 4K/UHD, there will be additional requirements from the Enhanced Content Protection (ECP) specification by Movielabs (an entity owned by several Hollywood studios). Leveraging the right DRM security level is particularly important because audio codecs are usually implemented in software, and cannot be enforced through “hardware-based DRM clients.”

Session-based and user-specific video watermarking enables the service operator to embed a unique identifier for each user. The ID is then used to trace any unauthorized redistribution of premium content. This technique is a critical anti-piracy tool to protect UHD premium content and live events broadcasting since it is possible to identify the actual device that is “leaking” or restreaming the content. This anti-piracy strategy allows for real-time detection of the source of pirated content and real-time shutdown of the illegal redistribution, and the ability to take other actions subject to the service provider’s policy. Another key requirement for implementing an effective anti-piracy strategy to protect live sports content is the ability to perform a fast extraction of the embedded forensic watermark. Contrary to protecting a video download or VOD-streamed content with forensic watermarking technology that was optimized for a non-real-time model, we now face live event instant restreaming piracy, meaning a real-time solution is required. With server-side video watermarking technologies, the traditional approach by studios for protecting on-demand content, it could  take several minutes to detect the watermark identifier once the pirated content has been identified and captured. This is far too long to effectively protect the revenue of a live event. Additional time is also required to identify the piracy and redistribution links and for responding to the piracy, which can include shutting down the source once the watermarking ID is extracted. An anti-piracy strategy for live sporting events requires forensic watermarking detection to be a near real-time process. Recent advancements in both server-side and client-side video watermarking solutions, especially for live streaming services, are aimed at better protecting the revenue of live sports.