Soccer has been a massive phenomenon on television since the 1970s; in fact, today it is one of the main products of the television grill. Not only for the audience, but also for the advertising aspect and because for many channels, especially pay TV, it is an important source of income since premium content ends up making the activity even more profitable..
The sport stopped the pandemic for a few months, and with it, the reinforcement to prevent piracy increased. Anderson Torres, Nagra's Anti-Piracy Manager, said that with people forced to stay at home, screens have become the main sources of entertainment. "For streaming service providers, D2C and pay TV, which had the sport as an attraction, the resumption of games is the time to recover subscribers who migrated to other platforms due to the cancellation of sporting events. This, considering the emergence of a “subscription economy”, which links little value to contractual commitments, and brings a new reality to which the industry is awakening”.
In fact, reinforced the executive, that although the pandemic of the new coronavirus has not had a negative impact on most streaming brands - industry analyst Omdia estimates that OTT providers will see a 12% increase in revenue in 2020 - , brought financial implications for specialized platforms or sports programming. "And even after the mandatory social detachment phase, it is quite likely that the change in the way people consume content, triggered by the Covid-19 outbreak, will remain - which, on the positive side, creates more opportunities for operators to expand their reach their services”, added.
A recent survey conducted by the Trade Desk revealed that in the US and in the UK consumers are willing to pay $20 / £20 a month, respectively for all their subscriptions. "How to react to this challenge is currently vexing operators. Is the solution to reduce production costs and combine this with more attractive commercial conditions, so that services become accessible to the largest possible number of consumers? Whilst unlikely to be viable economically, the costs can never match that those of their criminal counterparts given that pirates do not have content costs as part of their business model. Additionally, many consumers may not realize that they are purchasing pirated services and others will be more interested in the headline price rather than the underlying supplier. That is why today, the fight against the pirates requires a technological solution – and forensic watermarking, which provides several benefits, tops the list. In addition to supporting traditional pay-TV and OTT services, forensic watermarking is used to protect linear TV, live streaming, and VOD content from leaks. The process is automated and can determine the source of the leak quickly and efficiently, particularly for live sporting events, by identifying the sources of piracy and shutting them down in near real-time," commented Torres.
The Nagra executive recognized that it is necessary direct owners can also add another layer of brand of water not level of assassin to identify the target recipients of the content in case of pirates and real assassins who commit rape and piracy or content. "In the same way, the providers of TV services by assinatura can apply a brand of water not level of the device to identify a source of a pirate vazamento, including those used to feed illicit streaming servers, allowing an appropriate antipiracy action" .
Torres stated that another benefit of the forensic water mark is a network identification, which can play a critical role not to combat piracy, providing important information about the channels of an affiliate or licensee. "In the case of live sports, the owners of directives generally start implementing a network identification solution to take appropriate antipiracy actions, analyze the prescription of licensing by territory versus or risk of piracy, and review their content licensing strategy”.
Torres maintains that all of the above benefits are particularly critical today in the context of COVID-19 when demand for streaming is high. Combined with anti-piracy services, collaboration and legal actions, it can deliver effective action to stop piracy at the source in order to preserve the revenues from regulated activity.
The executive explained that, in this context, the ability to determine the percentage of pirated content on a given website works as a support for this type of investigation. "Based on the results of a recent Nagra study, we produced a metric to justify judicial requests for IP blocking due to lack of licensing. IP blocking and DNS redirection are extra weapons in the fight against illegal content transmission, helping to reduce exposure and access to pirated services. Because streaming piracy is relatively new legal territory, cooperation and dialogue between key stakeholders is essential for speeding up the time it takes to stop mass violations, especially for live broadcasts. Operators who implement strategies to protect premium content, when in this type of coalition, strengthen their barriers against the illegal distribution of content, creating difficulties for the criminals and discouraging those who use access their illicit services", concluded the executive.
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