Leading the fight against sports piracy

The customer wanted to more effectively address their sports piracy. They had an anti-piracy solution in place, but it was not helping them to keep their content secure. In fact, due to its popularity, their content was some of the most pirated in the world.

• Live events were heavily pirated
• The existing security solution was not effective
• Content worth billions was consequently losing value

As a conscientious rights owner, our client wanted to ensure that their licensees were deriving maximum value from the rights they’d purchased.

Eager to stop leaks and protect content worth billions in broadcasting rights, they wanted a new solution that could help them more effectively prevent piracy, through higher quality of service and a global, scalable approach to enforcement.

Their existing solution, based around traditional monitoring and enforcement techniques, had become ineffective. The unwillingness and inability of hosting providers to act on take-down notices resulted in a large availability of pirated content.

They needed a highly scalable solution that could handle the level of piracy they were facing. The client required support to determine how their content was being stolen, and innovations in technology and legislation to improve on the traditional enforcement methods that they had previously employed. 

• Dynamic Delivery Server Blocking 
• Worldwide Content Monitoring & Enforcement
• Data analysis and reporting

FMTS had established a reputation for successfully deploying Dynamic Delivery Server Blocking for another world-leading sports content owner, which encouraged the customer to approach FMTS.

After scoping out the scale and nature of the piracy that they faced, our team recommended implementing blocking along with our worldwide monitoring and enforcement services, and the support of our advanced data analysis and reporting capabilities.

Pioneered by FMTS in 2017, Dynamic Delivery Server Blocking is a network-level enforcement mechanism based on a legal order for local jurisdiction. It focuses on video delivery servers, rather than front-end pirate services. Access to illicit servers can be restricted in real time, drastically reducing the amount of illegal streams available, driving viewers to legitimate alternatives, and therefore helping to maintain the value of that content to the platforms that have licensed it.

• Up to 12,000 infringing servers blocked per live event
• Data analysis to understand the root cause of content fraud
• Successfully protected the value of their content

FMTS deployed server blocking and the results were impressive.

With the power of Dynamic Delivery Server Blocking in place, an average of 12,000 infringing servers were blocked per live event, hugely disrupting pirate service provision and causing widespread consternation in the piracy community of providers and viewers.

FMTS also worked closely with ISPs hosting some of the servers providing content illegally, and through this partner program were able to achieve a considerable reduction in the amount of servers they hosted.

Although blocking pirated content is useful for content protection, it is very important to avoid over-blocking (where legitimate content is blocked accidentally.) To combat this, FMTS several layers of verification checks and a highly responsive remediation backup mechanism in place, with the IPs blocked in this instance subjected to a battery of tests to ensure proportionality.