By Chris White, Chief Architect, Friend MTS
The greatest minds in fighting piracy have gazed into their crystal ball and provided us with some insights into the trends that are around the corner in 2025, as well as looking a few years out.
When Netflix viewers found their Tyson vs Paul video streams buffering and unreliable, they turned to social media in droves to watch the next round. But as social platforms find themselves increasingly in the front line for piracy, there is an awareness of the need to address this issue. Best in class is YouTube which, since its early experiences with music piracy, has invested heavily in tools and technology to fight piracy. Meta is also doing OK but could do more, while TikTok is making efforts to take piracy seriously. The platforms that are most notorious for dragging their heels on removing illegal content and lack on-platform tooling to address piracy, are X and Telegram but we remain positive that the few green shoots we have seen recently indicate that they are taking piracy more seriously.
Unless everyone in your organisation pulls together as a team, you will not be able to take on your biggest competitor in 2025: pirates. The challenge most content owners and video service providers face is that different parts of their businesses often have opposing priorities. While the security or legal teams might demand monitoring, watermarking or blocking services to tackle piracy, others in the finance, product or IT departments may disagree about the priority, cost or implementation. The way to overcome this is with a piracy strategy driven by the C-suite.
An important part of this process is changing mindsets from thinking about tackling piracy as a cost centre to instead recognising how it can protect existing revenues as well as generating additional revenues. One of the first steps in this process is to consider investing in a security audit or content monitoring engagement to have the data and insights to hand to understand the piracy landscape for your content and any specific vulnerabilities you may need to address, and to then devise the most effective strategies to maximise your ROI.
The days of watching a VHS filmed in the cinema are long gone. Instead, large scale criminal outfits are increasingly using high quality branding and sophisticated infrastructure to deliver pirate services and apps that can match legitimate services in terms of quality and far exceed them in terms of content breadth and price. Because these services are often behind paywalls, they can be problematic and time consuming for anti-piracy vendors to infiltrate. In 2025 we believe there will be a growing awareness by consumers that those services which appear too good to be true do in fact have a sting in the tail. Services can disappear or be disrupted mid-viewing, but worse, personal data or credit card details can be stolen for criminal activity and malware or malicious software can be installed on customer devices. Research has found that a whopping 72% of people who used a credit card for a piracy service subsequently became victims of credit card fraud.
The blatant scale of these operations became publicly apparent when the world’s largest international piracy organisation was dismantled at the end of November. FMTS was involved in a joint operation including AAPA, Europol, Eurojust and law enforcement authorities that targeted 102 suspects alleged to be serving pirating content to over 22 million users and cheating the industry out of over $3billion each year. Money laundering and cybercrime activities are also under investigation.
AI is no silver bullet for fighting piracy today. Instead, we need a holistic approach to combat the use of AI by pirates while emphasising the importance of human oversight in AI decision-making. Over the next few years we will see AI being used increasingly to automate many of the anti-piracy processes to bolster efficiency and effectiveness. While it will become better at detecting stolen content, it will continue to need to involve and hand over to human investigators to pursue further. Those humans will also continue to use their judgement and interpretation of in-depth data, assisted by AI, before taking further action.
This summer the broadcast industry held its breath as news came out about overblocking by Italy’s new anti-piracy platform Piracy Shield, which is managed by AGCOM, the country’s communications regulator. Nobody wants to be responsible for blocking legitimate online services, damaging brands and impacting revenues. As the industry digests this risk, we expect to see more restraint and increased scrutiny about automated solutions and a shift towards blocking services with proven accuracy and industry-proven monitoring tech.
More importantly, we now need to make a concerted effort to counter the controversy by educating the industry about how effective blocking has been over the last seven years. We support many big name and lesser known broadcasters, streamers and sports leagues such as UEFA in effective blocking that is protecting the value of rights and revenues, and have done so for numerous years without issue. This is achieved through best-in-class monitoring and forensically accurate technologies to ensure that any targets won’t cause collateral damage on legitimate services.
CDN leeching will continue to hit D2C streamers’ bottom lines in 2025. Despite cost cutting measures being top of mind, many are simply sticking their heads in the sand because they think the CDN leeching problem is complex and expensive to resolve. However, the issue won’t go away on its own because pirates love getting a free ride. FMTS will continue to encourage content owners and platform operators to adopt best practices, such as effective management of key rotation policies and differentiation of content quality based on device trust levels, that can be implemented to strengthen security.
2025 will see increasing demand for tools and techniques that help detect AI-amended and enhanced content, such as deep fakes. We expect this to result in demands for legislation to regulate the use of AI in content manipulation, and we are optimistic that we will quickly see developments to complement human efforts. In the meantime, content owners will start figuring out their level of tolerance for any manipulation before taking action. While they might turn a blind eye to memes, their red line could be a change to key scenes or even more serious content manipulation.
To learn more about the future of content protection, contact us today.