Payal Kapoor

Data interoperability enables flexible data operations for organizations, along with the freedom of not being locked into proprietary software or siloed data frameworks. The use of open-source tools such as HDFS can be easily combined with existing cloud data architecture, giving organizations the flexibility to use their data as they need it and in whatever way suits them best. Companies are seeking to modernize existing data warehouse assets with features like dynamic rights management, security, and multi-party data integration. They want complete control over all their data, no matter where it is and without the need for complex transfer or storage arrangements, which is why data interoperability has become such an attractive option. 

The most common content protection technology was associated with set-top boxes (STBs) that decrypted cable and satellite broadcasts for those who had paid their subscription. These are known as conditional access systems (CAS). Although these legacy technologies are gradually becoming outdated and will eventually need to be replaced, they’re still forming a considerable part of the content protection technology stack of traditional pay-TV operators, and maintaining backwards compatibility is important. Thus there is a need to support both traditional broadcast services and OTT services. The major shortcomings with traditional CA systems is that they are costly, both to acquire and to operate. Yet they are still considered necessary tools for broadcast TV content protection. They can also slow down the time-to-market for urgent new services and create vendor lock-in issues, both for broadcasters and device manufacturers. However, it doesn’t have to be like that.  As the market transitions to a widely diversified distribution model, flexibility is key. Fortunately, hybrid strategies that embrace both traditional broadcast models and streaming services can allow for greater security, flexibility in vendor management, and faster time to market. If operators also take advantage of cloud-based content protection services with pay-as-you-go models, the goal to lower the TCO, by reducing both CAPEX and OPEX costs, becomes attainable. Content protection technology and content protection systems are essential for both TV OEMs and broadcasters since without it, studios won’t agree to license their content. Yet, deploying such technology may present significant financial and business challenges. All pay-TV operators want to reduce operating costs while preparing for a transition to more flexible cloud-based services. Here are some of the core objectives with direct-to-TV broadcasting and converged content protection technology at expressplay.com.

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. Device proliferation and fragmentation are big challenges for OTT video distributors and extends across smartphones, tablets, PCs, TVs, and TV media players. The lion’s share of these devices natively support one of three DRMs associated with the dominant operating systems: Apple FairPlay Streaming with iOS, macOS, and tvOS; Microsoft PlayReady with every Windows device and some Android devices; and Google Widevine with every Android device. OTT streaming service providers also must contend with the fragmentation within the generations of operating systems. This is especially challenging when it comes to dealing with Android devices, which in the smartphone sector accounts for 87% of the global user base according to International Data Corporation (IDC) at expressplay.com.

A prospective digital rights management vendor needs to be able to assure access and interoperability across all platforms and with all kinds of OTT devices. When looking at digital rights management vendors, 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. Along with the Marlin DRM system, of which Intertrust was a founding partner, there are four other major DRMs created by the dominant tech players: Google’s Widevine, Microsoft’s PlayReady, Apple’s FairPlay Streaming and Adobe’s PrimeTime. For any DRM vendor to be able to provide a fully holistic DRM solution to their client, they must be able to offer support for all of the major systems; otherwise, the client will be facing major compatibility and operational issues in the future. One of the greatest successes of our digital rights management platform has been its open-standards non-proprietary nature, which means that major device and content producers are more open to adopting it as a ‘neutral’ DRM system. When choosing a digital rights management vendors, 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 in expressplay.com.

Content piracy is big. It’s costly. And it’s a growing ROI problem for content owners and distributors across the globe. Unlike previous, closed systems, today’s digital delivery system makes it easier for pirates to steal and re-stream illegal content anywhere in the world, using the same type of infrastructure used by the service providers themselves. 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. While many things have changed in the content world, the need for content owners and distributors to protect their bottom line remains the same. Live sports, TV and online movie piracy is a serious threat to ROI, requiring a holistic solution — spanning the delivery chain — to protect their investment. In our next blog post in this series we’ll start to assemble the full “puzzle of tools” needed for combating piracy at expressplay.com.

The most successful approach piracy ecosystem use is to run deeply discounted online services with linear portfolios, often with hundreds of channels. By aggregating content into multichannel streams with professional-quality EPGs, pirates can deliver a user experience that’s comparable to legal services — and steal their advertising and subscription revenue in the process.  These illegal services organize the content into multi-language presentations, allowing them to reach an international audience. They add features and use interactive communications between clients and services to gain insights into device usage, and the popularity of their content offerings. Moreover, they often benefit from ad revenue generated by online ad networks that believe they are legitimate OTT service providers.  Sometimes apps that offer pirate services also have legitimate offers at much higher prices, leading consumers to believe that the illegal sites are genuine competitors. Indeed, pirates have co-opted the “IPTV” label to the point that when people use such pirated sites, they think they are subscribed to legitimate IPTV services with a line up of television channels from major telcos. The illegal streaming situation seems to be worse among Millennials. One study focused on Millennials between 18-35 in North America found that of the 53% who admitted to having used illegal providers to stream TV shows and movies, nearly two-thirds said that streaming seemed “less wrong” than downloading. A 2016 Google survey of 2,700 19-24-year-olds in the U.S. found that 25% of those who access pirated content think such activity is legal, and all think it’s culturally acceptable at expressplay.com.

Revenue and brand for live sports watermarking organizations and streaming services around the world. Overall, by 2023, the revenue to pirates of pay TV and non-pay TV video is expected to exceed $67 billion worldwide. And even before the advent of COVID-19, the cost of overall online piracy worldwide was projected to hit $52 billion by the year 2022 – not including live sports or pay TV. 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 organizations 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. Now, as more sports leagues return to action and live programming, pirates who’ve gained traction in entertainment programming during the pandemic continue to target live sports as well. Sports organizations must remain vigilant in spotting ways pirates can exploit weaknesses in delivery systems. The next step is to protect content once it arrives at its intended legitimate destination. To ensure that playback devices are secure, in comes forensic watermarking. Described simply, a video watermark is an embedded overlay that identifies ownership. Taking up where DRM leaves off, video watermarking can confirm the outermost point of legitimate use. With that information, an organisation can isolate pirated content and identify the “bad actors” – the content pirates. Information can be embedded in the video itself, at the point of origin, in the Content Distribution Network (CDN) during distribution, or within the player device. Information can include the device IP address, session details, and subscriber identifier at expressplay.com.

Globally, the volume of global OTT drm streaming has grown 63% between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020, according to a report from Conviva, a leading supplier of video analytics technology. Similarly, total losses to piracy of streamed content worldwide are skyrocketing, impacting live and on-demand services alike. Digital TV Research projects that by 2022, global losses to online video piracy will reach $51.6 billion — nearly double the amount lost in 2016. Consider that hackers have honed their technical skills to develop and adopt new ways of defeating defenses and responding to detection with new brands and sites. The least technically sophisticated approaches that pirates use to get around the robust protection of sophisticated DRM systems include high-quality camcording from 4K UHD TV displays. Advanced methods, similar to those of professional pirates, include high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP) strippers. Other attacks target the multi-DRM service to extract the content keys, or exploit the DRM license acquisition server to circumnavigate license checking rules and retrieve DRM licenses. Pirates can also capture in-the-clear content from device memory as it awaits playback in the buffering process, in devices that don’t support Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and Secure Video Path (SVP). In some cases, if the same content keys and licenses are used for different resolutions, pirates will subscribe to the lower-quality content (e.g. SD resolution) and extract the keys to steal and redistribute higher-resolution —such as HD and 4K — variants of the content. An integral part of content packaging is the insertion of DRM signaling in the media, such as the common encryption Protection System Specific Header (PSSH). Because the content packaging and playback workflows need to coordinate the DRM signaling and Content Encryption Keys (CEK), it is critical that the content packaging workflow and the multi-DRM system are tightly integrated. The content packager needs to retrieve the CEK from a multi-DRM service provider that manages these keys securely. To maintain the security exchange of CEKs, Bitmovin encoders/packagers and Intertrust ExpressPlay DRM have integrated the Secure Packager and Encoder Key Exchange (SPEKE) protocol, which enables secure retrieval of the encryption keys and DRM signaling from the ExpressPlay key store. The content protection industry has broadly adopted the SPEKE protocol.  The protocol provides a simple and secure interface for delivery of CEKs and DRM signaling using a standard API that streamlines secure communications between the ExpressPlay DRM and encryptors, which in this case include encoders, packagers, and origin servers at expressplay.com.

Video watermarking (a.k.a. forensic watermarking or video watermarking) is a technology that is complementary to DRM and CAS, and it is a crucial element of an anti-piracy strategy. Forensic watermarking is used to imperceptibly alter video content (modification of a few pixels) to hide a unique identifier (forensic evidence, or “payload”). It is a similar concept to invisible ink and paper watermarks. In the case of OTT streaming, a multi-DRM service provides content protection for transport and storage, together with a license policy to define how the content may be consumed. 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. Forensic watermarking can be applied either server-side, or in the client device itself. Any good anti-piracy strategy must also consider the type of content that is to be watermarked. For example, for live streaming services, minimizing latency is essential. Therefore, several issues must be considered when adding a forensic watermark. Server-side technology requires tight integration with the live encoder and edge components such as CDNs. It is computationally intensive, and may add latency to live event transmissions. Another approach is to focus on client-side watermarking technology to battle theft of high-value sports content. This approach leverages a thin client with pre-integration in the video player for different types of streaming devices. Fortunately, in many cases the client-side watermarking approach does not require the significant watermarking integration nor add the system overhead that is currently required for the server-side solutions. Moreover, in order to protect the thin watermarking client, white-box cryptography technology is used to protect the app code and associated secrets, and to securely anchor the client software to the device. 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 at expressplay.com.