Mulready thinks we’ll start to see rights holders compelling broadcasters to include invisible watermarks as a condition for being granted the rights to events. Current efforts have focused on making it even more inconvenient. Illegal streaming is already a pretty terrible user experience – between broken links, blurry footage, and the dozens of pop-up ads and overlays you have to close before you can actually see any action. “Three factors drive piracy,” says Lonstein. But a long-term solution might require a softer approach. New legislation is helping rights holders to take down content more quickly, and go after aggregator sites like r/soccerstreams. The process is not entirely automated – humans still verify that streams are actually illegal, and the takedown process still sometimes requires human intervention because it’s an activity that often crosses multiple international borders: a Sky feed in the UK could be beamed to a server in Asia and then watched by a viewer in North America. With that unique watermark hidden somewhere in the content, it’s essentially the digital version of writing your name on your possessions in traceable, invisible ink.” “They’re also resistant to nearly any transformation of the video in size, format or resolution. “Our watermarks are completely imperceptible to the consumer,” says Trudelle. Read more: How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams Companies such as Irdeto and NAGRA now offer ‘forensic watermarking,’ – serial numbers or other information hidden in the video footage, but invisible to the human eye. There are devices for sale on Amazon, eBay and Alibaba, says Mulready, that can automatically remove visible watermarks. Streamers now use technology that can crop, mirror or distort footage so that the source of streams cannot be identified via a watermark. “With fast content detection and recognition, it’s possible to “close the loop”, and notify the operator to turn off broadcast distribution to the set-top box in a matter of minutes – a key requirement for sports events,” says Simon Trudelle, senior director of product marketing at NAGRA, which provides anti-streaming technology for the German football association and others.Īn arms race has developed. The empty pint glass that appears in the corner if you’re watching in a pub serves much the same purpose. That’s a watermark, unique to your viewing card – so if you decide to stream your subscription online via a hacked set-top box, for example, Sky can easily find out who you are. If you’re a Sky Sports subscriber, you might have noticed a string of numbers in the top right hand corner of your screen during games. Between January 2016 and June 2018, it identified over 15 billion viewers on 700,000 streams.īut finding the streams is only half the battle – and it’s a war that’s being played out in full view of those watching at home. “It automates what a human would do,” says Lonstein. VFT has built tech that can instantly identify such streams by crawling not only the internet itself, but also the apps and other platforms people are not using. “The leaks in the dam are millions of little leaks.” Instead of streams going out to tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers, people are now using established services such as Twitch and Facebook Live to stream games to a few hundred or thousand people at a time, often on hard-to-find private channels. His company, VFT Solutions, has highlighted the growing issue of ‘nano-piracy’. Wayne Lonstein calls this the ‘whack-a-mole’ approach. “Frustrate the pirate consumer and drive them back to legal means.” “Our goal is to remove as many as quickly as possible during the course of the event,” says Mulready. It uses web crawlers similar to the ones that underpin Google to find illegal streams, and groups such as r/soccerstreams that are known hotbeds of links. “You need to be ready prior to the kick-off,” says Mark Mulready, VP of cybersecurity services at Irdeto, which works with the Premier League to tackle streaming.
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