Shielding high-octane live sports from piracy

The content owner, which licenses its content around the world, wants to understand where it was being pirated, and how this could be stopped.

• High-octane live sports content worth billions of dollars losing value
• Content heavily pirated due to its popularity
• The customer needs a robust, rapid solution to protect the value of content 

The content owner, which licenses its content around the world, wanted to understand where it was being pirated, and how this could be stopped.

A key challenge was the complexity of the content being distributed across multiple platforms, countries, broadcasters and licensees.

The scale and the nature of the piracy demanded a fully scalable solution capable of pinpointing the areas in the distribution network that needed additional security. 

The customer already had content protection in place but it wasn’t effective enough to tackle the full issue. They were looking for a new partner offering a stronger, more resilient solution.

• Global content monitoring and enforcement
• Distribution level watermarking to identify sources of leaks
• Three-year partnership deal to continually analyse and prevent piracy 

The solution provided a range of monitoring and analytical services.

This enabled the customer’s team to gain a deep understanding of where content is being redistributed, and how pirates gain access to it.

As well as distributing through partners, the content owner also used their own broadcast platform to stream the sport in question to viewers globally. In this context, watermarking was a very pertinent solution to identify leaks and take down illegal accounts quickly.

The deployed solutions ensured illegal streams were quickly detected and disabled, which is crucial in maintaining the value of live sports broadcasting. Ultimately this has helped the content owner to guide audiences to legal sources, thus protecting all those associated with creating the world’s most adrenaline-fuelled sport.

• Over 4,000 illegal streams identified per live event
• Effective enforcement measures to stop and deter illegal redistribution of content
• Disruption of notorious pirate hosting provider 

The advanced highly automated global monitoring platform helped the content owner to identify over 4,000 illegal streams per live event and to act upon them with effective enforcement methods.

The automated and scalable nature of FMTS enforcement methods means that instances of piracy can be addressed within seconds once identified, helping to deliver real-time support against the fast-paced tactics of hackers.

The FMTS team also worked relentlessly to disrupt one of the most notorious hosting providers who was responsible for a large amount of copyright infringement seen by this customer and the sports industry. Through intensive investigations, the infrastructure service provider was identified and the relevant IP addresses have been blocked to void the services offered by these illegal operations. Work is currently ongoing to continue to disrupt further networks to ensure infringements continue to drop and to ultimately disrupt and stop pirate services.