Knect365
Professionalised OTT piracy is the biggest threat facing
pay-TV providers and content rights holders globally. In the MENA region –
world’s fastest growing TV market – operators are fighting back.
The competition for entertainment hegemony in the Arab world
is fierce. The regional TV and video market is growing at unprecedented speeds
with most countries forecast to double the penetration of services by 2020.
Yet, video piracy is rife. A report by advisors IDC, Piracy
in the Middle East and Africa, estimates illegal content distribution costs the
industry more than US$750m every year.
“Piracy in MENA impacts the pay-TV industry immensely,” says
Mohammad Al Subaie, executive director of commercial affairs at Al-Jazeera
sports network beIN. “Piracy causes millions of dollars of losses to
organisations, governments and deprives legitimate industries like regional
content creators from return on their investments.”
"Piracy causes millions of dollars of losses to
organisations, governments and deprives legitimate industries like regional
content creators from return on their investments."
IDATE DigiWorld forecasts that the TV market in
Africa/Middle East will grow 30% between 2016 and 2021, from €10.3 billion to
€13.3bn. This momentum, which is driven largely by sub-Saharan Africa, represents
the world’s fastest-growing TV market, not only today but also for the five
years to come, states IDATE.
With a young and fast-growing population, a growing middle
class, a solid medium-term economic outlook – despite the turbulence caused by
falling oil prices in the Gulf States – the socio-economic variables point to a
positive future for the region’s audiovisual sector. This positive outlook is
manifested in increased TV ownership levels and progress in cellular network
rollouts, with the bonus of creating a massive new base of screens for watching
video.
IDATE predicts the number of TV subscribers will double in
five years, apace with the rise of OTT video services. However, these typically
low-cost OTT services are contributing, along with still massive levels of
piracy in the region “to driving down the price of pay-TV plans”, says the
analyst.
Piracy is, in fact, no more prevalent in the Middle
East or the wider African continent than in any other region, but there are
region-specific issues.
“A lot of people from MENA have emigrated to other
countries, and that has created a lot of demand for content from them in the
regions they’ve moved to,” says Christopher Schouten, Senior Director Product
Marketing at Nagra. “Pay-TV operators have adjusted by licensing ethnic
content, but they aren’t as successful as they’d like to be, because people can
simply stream their channels from home using pirate IPTV services. The same is
true for foreign immigrants and workers in the MENA region, so that is also
harming MENA businesses.”
Another factor harming MENA businesses is the reticence of
foreign operators to license MENA content for local distribution because of the
prevalence of pirate versions of those channels being available already.
“Much of that content is FTA in MENA, but paid in other regions, and that makes
it particularly difficult to trace pirate leaks,” notes Schouten. “There is no
watermarking or fingerprinting available on FTA content. Expats are really
driving piracy globally.”
Content theft occurs in the region in the same way it does
in the rest of the world: illegal set-top boxes, both for IPTV streaming and
for traditional satellite services using internet Key Sharing. Because of the
lack of internet penetration in some countries, Internet Key Sharing and
control word sharing on legacy CAS systems is probably a bigger problem in
MENA, but content sharing is increasingly quickly.
Professional and illegal
“Pirates are entrepreneurs as well as criminals,” observes
Khaled Al-Jamal, Head of Sales, MENA, Irdeto. “They know what appeals to their
market. Control word sharing still appears in the region. We recently
worked with MultiChoice Africa and the Egyptian law enforcement teams to close
one of the largest pirate networks for control word sharing that we’ve
encountered. The pirates were recently sentenced, providing a clear message
that piracy of any type is an offense and will not be tolerated.”
Nonetheless, as little as 2 to 3Mbps is sufficient to access
hundreds of pirated pay TV channels and movies from almost everywhere in the
world in HD or near HD quality. “This, combined with the ease, simplicity
and low-cost nature of pirate OTT devices, means that we’re facing a wave of
piracy bigger than we’ve ever seen before,” warns Al-Jamal.
Indeed, the main challenge is that many pirate OTT services
have a professional looking website and service, often offering support and
money-back guarantees, with bundles to appeal to specific markets and sometimes
even content that is not otherwise available in the MENA region.
The experience often fools consumers into believing the
service is legitimate. Pay-TV operator face potential subscriber churn to
cheaper illegal services as a result while rights holders risk loss of revenue
as alternative sources dilute the value of their content.
“They are a bigger threat to pay-TV than ever before because
they’ve got so advanced that many consumers assume they’re legal solutions when
they’re not,” says Schouten. “In that sense, piracy can be seen more like a competitor
than an enemy. Since people are willing to pay for exclusive content and a
high-quality user experience that makes it easy to find the content they love,
pay-TV providers need to work even harder to deliver a cutting-edge, innovative
content catalogue and feature set.”
Consumer attitudes to viewing pirated content don’t help. A
recent survey conducted by Irdeto found that more than half of respondents
polled in MENA (59% in Egypt and 53% in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC))
admitted to watching pirated video.
“Millennials are among the most likely to illegally consume
content, with 62% of 18- to 24-year-olds in the GCC and 64% in Egypt stating
they watch pirated video,” says Al-Jamal.
Content redistribution
While content theft is overwhelmingly focused on
redistribution, consumption habits of pirated content in the MENA region are
evolving. Irdeto’s research found that laptops remain the favourite device for
consuming pirated video content, for 33% of respondents in the GCC and 35% in
Egypt smartphones or tablets are their most frequently used devices to watch
pirate content.
It’s not just the millennials that are leading this shift.
In fact, MENA is an anomaly in so much as the gap between 18- to 24-year-olds
and other age groups is the smallest when it comes to the preferred device
(mobile – which includes Android/iOS smartphones and tablets). Globally,
26.9% of 18- to 24-year-olds prefer to watch pirated content on mobile devices;
compared to just 13% of over 55s. Yet, over 55s in the Middle East seem to
have millennial tendencies with 30.9% using mobile devices for their pirated
content and 37.6% for the 18- to 24-year-olds.
“It’s a clear indicator that operators in the region must
continue to innovate to provide all of their consumers with packages that
include cross-device content they desire,” stresses Al-Jamal.
Premium security today means 360-degree protection trusted
by content owners, from protecting broadcast and on-demand services, to
end-to-end piracy control and watermarking.
“Pay-TV providers looking to secure rights to UHD content
and early release movies need to have a watermarking solution,” says
Al-Jamal. With consumers’ increasing expectations around OTT, it is
crucial for operators to be able to reach consumers on any device, while
securely delivering premium content and a great user experience. A
software-based security solution will allow operators to do this.”
The implementation of forensic watermarking is a vital part
of the security chain, but one that requires a long-term plan and commitment to
be effective.
“Invest in anti-piracy services with a partner who has a
broad enough portfolio to attack ALL kinds of piracy, whether on the web or
behind IPTV pay walls,” urges Schouten. “Work with your CAS provider to
implement these technologies and create a closed-loop system that can quickly
shut down live streaming content so that destabilize confidence in pirate solutions.”
Educating consumer about the damage that piracy causes has a
role to play. IBCAP in the US is an excellent example of this. It created a humorous
but effective campaign warning consumers that if they buy illegal boxes and
services, that they are at risk of wasting their investment, because legitimate
content providers will work with content protection companies to take these
services down.
“Often, we choose critical moments (like the middle of a
sports match) to disrupt these services so that consumers realize that they
risk missing out on the content they love the most,” explains Schouten. “This
has a strong educational impact and dissuades them from experiencing such
disappointments again in the future.”
Knowledge gap
There’s a positive response to education from Irdeto’s
survey. Of respondents who view pirated content, 46% in Egypt and 47% in the
GCC said they would stop or watch less pirated content if they understood the
negative impact of piracy on the media industry. The survey found that nearly a
third of consumers in MENA (29% in GCC and 30% in Egypt) don’t know whether it
is illegal to share or produce pirated video content. The number of respondents
unsure if it was illegal to download or stream pirated video content was
similar, with 33% unsure in the GCC and 32% uncertain in Egypt.
Al-Jamal explains: “There is a clear knowledge gap in terms
of the legality of piracy. In order to combat this threat, the media industry
must not only educate themselves about their pirate competitors, but also
educate consumers about the damage that piracy causes the content creation
industry.
“Arguably, the most important task in the fight against
piracy is the identification of illegal activity and pirated content through
effective tooling that searches for and identifies watermarked content, which
is crucial to revenue and copyright protection. The additional challenge for
operators therefore is to know what content is popular on pirate sites.”
Action is doubly difficult since piracy is global. “To
combat illegal streamers located in Russia but delivering the service in the
Middle East, local operators need to work with security specialists and other
worldwide content protection organisations,” says Chrys Poulain, Sales
Director, MENA at NexGuard.
MENA can be a particularly difficult environment in which to
enforce intellectual property rights because it lacks a homogeneous set of laws
and regulations related to piracy across the region (which the US and EU have).
“The enforcement of copyright is not always a top priority,”
says Schouten. “Some countries treat it very seriously, some not at all.
Because there’s not a lot of high-value content coming out of that region (eg
global, blockbuster movies, high-value sports, etc), it’s generally not taken
as seriously.”
Working with industry bodies
There is change afoot. The UAE-based MENA Broadcast
Satellite Anti-Piracy Coalition, launched by satellite broadcaster OSN in 2014,
for example, has helped remove over 86,000 illegal videos from YouTube and
Dailymotion, taken down nearly 2,300 advertisements of pirated boxes on online
markets, and reported 829 free-to-air channel copyright infringements to
satellite operators and distributors.
Sophie Moloney, OSN’s general counsel and head of content
protection is quoted in The Gulf Times saying, “We have a whole generation of
under 30s who have come to expect content to be made available free and that’s
why we need to join forces across the entire Arab world to educate people to
the realities of how movies, series and sports get funded. Not only that but we
need to work together to fight criminality that takes advantage of this illegal
demand.”
Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Entertainment – in
charge of overseeing all facets of the country’s entertainment industry – is
being urged to reinforce protection for the Kingdom’s burgeoning pay-TV market.
Consultants AT Kearney predict growth from 750,000 to 2.68 million households
by 2020. The huge appetite for local talent and international content has also
helped the Kingdom lead with the highest per capita consumption of YouTube in
the whole world since 2012.
“This leads to a fundamental question for content protection
specialists: how can the Kingdom ensure that it provides legal platforms to
consumers who are – intentionally or unintentionally — accustomed to accessing
their video content illegally or on YouTube?” poses Poulain.
“In countries like Saudi Arabia where the notion of
copyright remains loose, we believe it is paramount to track illegal
redistribution sources,” says Poulain. “However, we can go beyond simply
punishing pirates. We can use the original copy being re-streamed as a platform
to issue informative messages about copyright infringement and provide legal
alternatives — effectively enabling us to reach not just the pirate, but also
all the viewers of the illicit stream.”
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. To effectively
combat online piracy, operators, telcos, broadcasters and publishers must
combine state-of-the-art forensic watermarking technologies that identify the
source of pirated content and allow for its immediate shutdown, with proactive
enforcement and investigative services aimed at identifying and prosecuting the
parties involved in large commercial streaming piracy networks. Global
partnerships are necessary with law enforcement, industry bodies and agencies
as well as consumer and technology providers.
“Moving forward, the challenge for the Middle Eastern
content industry will be to combine these organisations with innovative and
affordable services that leverage social media channels like YouTube, Facebook
and Twitter, and find better ways to track pirates and inform the general
public,” says Poulain.
In doing so, the MENA media industry can ensure that it
provides a perfect environment to support the creativity of the content
industry, while enabling consumers to access content in a legal and user-friendly
way.
No comments:
Post a Comment