Doug Lowther, CEO of Irdeto, talks to BroadcastPro ME about how the rise of broadband has made piracy a global challenge, and how new research and data is helping broadcasters revisit business models How has piracy evolved over the years? In the past, there have been piracy hotspots, where piracy has been more prevalent than […]
Doug Lowther, CEO of Irdeto, talks to BroadcastPro ME about how the rise of broadband has made piracy a global challenge, and how new research and data is helping broadcasters revisit business models
How has piracy evolved over the years?
In the past, there have been piracy hotspots, where piracy has been more prevalent than in other countries. However, we now see this has become a global problem that needs to be countered with global solutions. The technical nature of piracy, for instance, has changed because of the rise of broadband, and therefore, we see more piracy today in the form of redistribution of content on the internet than through traditional methods.
Also, the economic effects of piracy are happening much more quickly on a worldwide basis. For instance, we undertake some monitoring activities whenever a new series of, say, Game of Thrones is released. We have some activities to track how rapidly that content shows up on BitTorrent sites and who is downloading it and so on.
We are doing this partly to raise awareness and sensitivity to how fundamentally this whole business is changing, and in this instance, what we did at the beginning of the season was look at how much redistribution was occurring and to which countries and how quickly after the launch. We saw that within days of the release of the season, there were large numbers of redistribution activities happening across the world. For instance, with Season 4 of Game of Thrones, piracy through redistribution on the internet had tripled compared to the previous year.
We are seeing traditional forms of piracy such as hacking becoming relatively less prominent as internet models become more important.
What does this mean for a solution provider like you?
It means we have to make changes to the technology. For example, forensic watermarking, where we insert a piece of code into the broadcast stream, enables you to find where a specific piece of content was pirated and where it came from. This then enables us to work with the authorities in that country to address the problem.
In another instance, we have built a global service operations centre in the Netherlands which manages our anti-piracy efforts worldwide, and we complement that with technical resources and investigators in the field in many places, including the Middle East. We have an office location in Dubai and a technical anti-piracy person who works in the region. There has to be a number of simultaneous and ongoing efforts, like investigating piracy and also putting in place technical measures to ensure we can track the pirated content and work with authorities to address it.
How has the industry evolved to tackle this new form of piracy?
The issue is global, and, therefore, it requires a lot of collaborative effort. The other fundamental change is that anti-piracy is quite an end-to-end activity. It is not about a single operator having a secure pipe from the uplink to the downlink to the set-top box. It is, to use the phrase, from glass to glass from the time of the production to the time it is viewed on any screen, big or small.
And so, increasingly, we are working with the content owners and the originators of the content, whether they be operators, studios or sports rights holders. We work directly with the English Premier League, for instance, on anti-piracy rights from the content creation and the production to the time it hits the screen. We work with content originators and Hollywood studios like Twentieth Century Fox and Disney, and use forensic techniques to insert unique information into their broadcast content and help them to detect what is happening with their content.
What are the implications of this kind of research for broadcasters?
There is a lot of big data implications and lots of potential value in this sort of information, because if you know which countries, which geographies and demographics are interested in a given piece of content, it helps the broadcaster to target those demographics with a legal service. In a lot of cases, someone is watching pirated content not because they want to be a pirate, but because that content is not available yet on a legal service in the country they reside in, or it appears in another time window. This information changes the business of broadcasters and makes release windows happen more quickly.
With content redistribution across the internet, have the piracy hotspots changed?
Indeed. A lot of places where you might not expect traditional pay TV piracy 10 years ago are now becoming major hubs for this industry. Places that are highly connected and have very high quality broadband services like South Korea and the Netherlands now tend to show a lot of activity with regards to redistribution of content, so we are working with the authorities in those areas to address this.
Whats your take on the Middle East? Is there a piracy hub here?
We are very active with the anti-piracy coalition in the Middle East. I dont think there is a specific country that acts as a hub. The type of piracy you see varies from place to place depending on broadband connectivity. In Dubai, where there is a greater broadband infrastructure, you are likely to see more internet piracy, while in Egypt, where broadband connectivity might be relatively lower, you might see more traditional forms of piracy.
Piracy is a challenge across the Middle East, including Egypt. You only need a 2MB connection these days for a good viewing experience on a pirated IP box, and if your screen is smaller, you require correspondingly less data for a good viewing experience.
You mentioned investigators?
There are two main forms of investigation we do some are technical in nature, while others are legal and regulatory in nature. When I say the former, people think of detectives, but a lot of this is more working with local regulators and local government officials to, for example, block the import of potential pirate devices.
Where an operator has a good anti-piracy team, we are able to cooperate well with them. This has been the case with operators in the Middle East like beIN and OSN. We have had good cooperation with them on anti-piracy. However, because this is more of a global game and piracy in one territory can affect another, we work with our teams in the Middle East as well as in South Africa, Turkey, Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Greece essentially any country that shares the same satellite and where one can impact the other.
We hosted a piracy lounge at IBC for visitors to see how it is almost impossible to distinguish today between a legitimate platform and a pirate platform, because in many cases, the latter are also professionally packaged and marketed. The consumer could, therefore, be subscribing to a package that they think is perfectly legitimate. The other hallmark is that the anti-piracy team is often facing a pirate service that combines the legitimate services of many pay TV operators together into one signal. So you will see, for instance, that one service offers 800 channels of pay TV content while the pay TV operator itself may not have that many channels to offer.
What is the biggest challenge for you with the redistribution of content?
The internet is global in nature and has very low barriers between countries, time zones and geographies, and yet, operators have tended to operate on a national or regional basis, and so in a sense, they are competing. They are actually competing with players who have fewer restrictions in how they do business, and so we have to adapt as an industry, and adapt regulation and release windows and be in a better position to compete with these alternative services.
Illegal downloads of Game of Thrones episodes increased more than 45% year-over-year in the final weeks before the Season 5 premiere.
Irdeto released global piracy figures for Game of Thrones in the final weeks leading up to its season premiere on April 12. The findings indicated a 45% increase in piracy worldwide from 2014, with episodes of Game of Thrones (seasons 1-4) illegally downloaded more than 7 million times between February 5 and April 6, 2015. The same period saw 4.9 million downloads in 2014.The 2015 data shows an average of 116,000 illegal downloads per day of Game of Thrones episodes, which is an increase of 36,000 more downloads per day compared to 2014.
Irdeto found that previous episodes of the series were pirated almost 37,000 times during the first week of April in the US this year, prior to HBO Now launching on April 7. Currently, HBO Now is only available in the US on Apple devices and PC/Mac browsers.
Despite the popularity of The Walking Dead and new shows like Vikings, Game of Thrones is still the most pirated show worldwide. Compared to Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead had over 5.7 million downloads, followed by Breaking Bad (3.8 million), Vikings (3.4 million) and House of Cards (2.7 million).
When tracking country-specific piracy rates, Irdeto noticed a decline in illegal downloads for Game of Thrones in the Russian Federation (-27%), but interest spiked in other areas, such as India (155%). The percentage change by country is mostly dependent on the popularity of the TV show. However, it is expected that in the future, developing countries will increasingly contribute to the rise in piracy due to general improvement in broadband penetration and quality. When it comes to more developed countries, the US saw an increase of nearly 10% in piracy, while the UK saw an increase of over 30%.
Irdeto tracked illegal download data for previous Game of Thrones seasons in the US, UK and over 200 countries worldwide between 5 February and 6 April in both 2014 and 2015 through its automated crawlers, which use proprietary tracking software to identify users and files on the BitTorrent network. A download represents a unique IP address pirating a unique file on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network.
The report covered the most popular TV shows from pure OTT operators (Amazon Prime, Crackle, Hulu, Netflix) versus premium broadcasters (HBO, Showtime, Starz) and broadcasters with syndication deals with the pure OTT operators (AMC, FX). The findings were to help uncover insights that can help operators understand the interest in content by region and capitalise on that demand, while also offering key intelligence for future multiscreen and hybrid television strategies.
