UBB2020
Pirates today are very sophisticated, not only in the
technologies they use to capture and redistribute content but also in how they
protect themselves from content owners and anti-piracy vendors.
This problem is amplified because content is no longer only
available via smartcard; the prevalence of networks and devices makes content
distributors vulnerable to myriad threats. Although protection continues to
become more sophisticated, the sheer volume of streaming approaches makes it
difficult to close all potential points of attack.
While some pirate organizations do everything -- from
capturing content to redistributing it to the user -- many pirates specialize
in one part of the chain, content protection specialist Nagra said. Some solely
capture content and resell it, while others exclusively build a viewer base and
embed streams.
There also is the alarming development of clandestine ad
networks created by pirates for pirates, largely due to their rejection by
legitimate ad networks (think Google Ad Words and Facebook).
"Pirates have moved from focusing on distributing
access rights to legitimate broadcasts ... to distributing the content itself
and therefore benefitting from the technical advances in technology, such as Adaptive
Bitrate Rate (ABR) streaming and cloud hosting," said Fred Ellis, senior
director at Arris Security Solutions, in an interview.
In its study, Anatomy Media found 69% of young millennials
use at least one form of video piracy; of that group, 60% stream content
without paying, according to "Millennials at the Gate."
Even with a crackdown on the sale of pirate devices by large
e-commerce sites, pirates adapt by using vague terms that merely hint at what a
user could access on pirate IPTV services. Even some major retail chains sell
these devices.
Pirates have become better at protecting against anti-piracy efforts.
"Some use session-based tokens to prevent ISPs from
accessing those URLs to validate infringement notices, some generate dynamic
URLs that change every few minutes so they can argue they are compliant and are
taking down streams," Christopher Schouten, senior director of product
marketing at Nagra told UBB2020. "Some block access to the infringing
streams to IP ranges from major cloud computing providers" as they know
these are used by anti-piracy vendors.
Ideally, content creators protect the entire platform with an end-to-end
solution, from watermarking to fingerprinting, crawling, capturing and taking
down the source of the infringement, said Schouten.
"Regardless of whether they work with Nagra for the
entire solution or only parts of it, they still need to act. If piracy is left
unattended it will grow at an exponential rate," he said.
Pirates are driven by opportunity: Deployments scale with
larger audiences, especially as a result of OTT video delivery services.
"Given a large enough target population and motivated
by limited availability of specific content, pirates will invest fairly heavily
to find flaws in any deployed system," warned Arris's Ellis. "Content
protection organizations must provide solutions that have been well designed
from a protocol and cryptographic algorithm point of view [and] which have been
analyzed carefully in regard to robustness."
It's critical to protect content across three key locations,
added Petr Peterka, CTO at content security vendor Verimatrix, in an interview.
The first is where the service is hosted. "They need to be sure it is
protected while it is still in their hands," Peterka said. Hacking
involving major distributors like HBO and Disney are examples of pirates going
directly to the source.
The next step: Put proper security measures in place to
prevent illicit capturing of content as it is delivered. Conditional access
(CAS) and digital rights management (DRM) help here. Finally, service providers
must ensure end-devices, where content is consumed, operate in a trusted,
secure manner -- and that robust security measures are maintained over time.
"An important question to ask would be if they take
advantage of security tools like trusted execution environments [TEEs] and
downloadable DRM that are available to ensure that new security advancements
can be applied later down the road," said Peterka.
During any of these stages, providers can use anti-piracy
monitoring and detection services for traceability. They can leverage forensic
watermarking to trace instances of illegal redistribution back to an individual
subscriber or compromised device so service providers can shut it down and even
take legal action.
The investment required of OTT providers, broadcasters and pay-TV operators
differs very little if their strategies are largely aligned.
"Both content owners as well as distributors need to
protect their interests using content security technologies as well as forensic
watermarking during every stage of the production and distribution
process," said Schouten.
There are some distinctions. OTT providers must implement
two aspects of protection. One to attain content licenses from content
providers such as studios and networks in order to gain the ROI they need for
their product offering. The level of protection of the content depends on the
content owner and the content value, which increases with early release windows
and the video quality of the content (UHD).
Service providers also must protect revenue by ensuring only
authorized subscribers access systems, he said. Any compromise of
authentication or authorization processes deters revenue generation.
Broadcasters and pay-TV operators generally deliver content
in a more controlled environment -- over a managed network to fixed devices,
such as operator-controlled set-top boxes. Better hardware and endpoint
security simplifies content protection on these boxes, since the platform's
cost structure is more flexible.
OTTs, which deliver content over the Internet, usually
target a vast number of devices including open platforms. Neither the device
nor the network is under the system operator's control. Operators must gain
some control via other technology capabilities, such as white-box cryptography
and tamper detection.
As subscribers adopted DVRs, 4K TVs, smartphones, gaming
devices and tablets for their viewing pleasure, content pirates evolved from
yesterday's clunky videotapes to more high-tech, IP-based solutions.
System operators need a proven and experienced, well-funded
content protection partner that provides maximum security to their deployment
and delivery updates and enhancements to stay ahead of pirates' new and
emerging threats, Ellis said.
Operators can apply a common framework across DRMs to
address a fragmented ecosystem, which is posed when devices come with different
pre-integrated security solutions, Verimatrix's Peterka said.
"Service providers can solve multi-DRM challenges by
providing harmonized rights management across networks and devices for OTT
video delivery," he said. "Selecting a framework that allows for the
inclusion of any third-party DRM scheme for a harmonized rights platform can
ultimately provide complete end-to-end management of revenue security."
Content protection must safeguard content from the point of ingestion to the point of playback on the user's device. Content needs to always be encrypted and the resultant, associated decryption key must then be securely delivered to the end device. The encryption must be an algorithm that content owners have approved. In addition, the solution must be capable of disabling output capabilities on the end device in order to prevent unauthorized distribution via copy control.
"The overall content protection solution is a layered
approach which spans many components within the system," said Ellis.
"The content protection provider must align and partner with chip
providers, device manufacturers and system operators to ensure the proper
security capabilities are in place, where necessary."
Protection doesn't end there. Operators are strongly advised
to square the circle with constant monitoring and enforcement: scan, capture,
fingerprint, identify, extract watermark, enforce, and repeat as necessary.
"If you don't know your video content is being stolen, how can you possibly stop it?" said Peterka. "Monitoring of real-time transactions can spot unusual patterns and anomalies that would require a team of experts to achieve by crawling through the web. It is crucial to monitor deployments from the inside out, tracing down sources of illicit redistribution and addressing them is as close to real time as possible."
Watermarking -- an adjunct to content protection -- can
identify theft that may have occurred after the fact, often acting as a
deterrent than a prevention technique.
"It's in everyone's interest that they each embed their
own forensic watermarking or other ID in the content itself, so that when the
parties are discussing who allowed which content to leak, there is
incontrovertible evidence to show where the leak came from," said
Schouten.
For traceability, mass delivery of uniquely marked content
to combat revenue leakage in on-demand video service models, including OTT delivery
to devices such as smartphones, games consoles and smart TVs, works well, said
Verimatrix.
"Server-side embedding processes can uniquely mark
compressed -- and even encrypted -- content files during delivery, and it is an
important alternative to client-side embedding since it does not require any
integration with, or modification to, the client devices," said Peterka.
"It is essential that the resulting stream can be decrypted, decompressed
and rendered by regular client devices, either in hardware or software. That
way, all downstream copies will contain the unique payload, which can be
extracted by machine aided comparison with the original content, even after
severe distortion or degradation."
No technical solutions are 100% watertight. Security is never perfect; it is
always a process, said Schouten. It is imperative that service providers
upgrade, monitor and track vulnerabilities in a timely manner, he said.
"It is unlikely that piracy will ever stop so it needs
to be made harder to achieve. It is not easy or cheap to pirate video content,
so one way to reduce the prevalence would be to make it cheaper for subscribers
to access legally than for pirates to steal," Schouten said. "Making
video content easy and affordable to obtain legally can certainly reduce the
negative aspects associated with piracy."
Technical solutions are limited in their ability to control
piracy, said Ellis.
"Content protection systems can make it very difficult
to extract information from the system, but there is no ability to absolutely
prevent it. Security is always rated by how long it would take to 'brute force'
it with technology available today; content protection solution's job is to
ensure the system is protected in such a way that the pirate is left with only
that brute force approach open to them," he said.
With today's available technologies, monitoring and frequent
updates, the entire content chain can make it tougher for pirates to illicitly
avail themselves of providers' revenue opportunity. This multi-disciplinary
approach has as much to do with awareness and partnership as technology.
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