Synamedia: Premium OTT attracts premium pirates

CSI

Streaming piracy remains the biggest problem facing the industry and one that no amount of technical firepower can tackle.

“Premium OTT content attracts premium pirates,” said Jean-Marc Racine, CPO, Synamedia. “The level of sophistication is unprecedented.”
https://www.csimagazine.com/csi/Synamedia-Premium-OTT-attracts-premium-pirates.php

Arguably no company has done more to secure pay TV than NDS, the core of which was sold by Cisco to Permira and renamed Synamedia a year ago.

“Watermarking and CA and other technique have their part to play but are not the only solution to the problem,” Racine said. “We believe that the STB is secure but there are many unmanaged devices and elements along the chain that we don’t control and where leaks are inevitable.

“Even when you secure one link, another will pop-up,” he added. “It’s cat and mouse.”

No company is more at threat from piracy than BeIN Media. The Quatar-based pay-TV outfit lost an estimated 47% of its subscriber base in the two years to the end of 2018, according to Digital TV Research, largely attributed to hacking of its exclusive sports rights. In June, BeIN was forced to lay off 300 staff citing piracy as a factor.

BeoutQ, the outfit allegedly backed by the Saudi Arabian government, is widely fingered as the chief culprit.

Even while BeoutQ’s satellite operation has been off air since the beginning of August following pressure from international sports rights holders such as FIFA and a case action brought against it to the World Trade Organisation, the concern is that it is regrouping to relaunch with new technology and a possible rebrand.

“Piracy cannot be solved by technology alone and piracy is not our problem alone,” stated Israel Esteban, executive director of technology, beIN Media. “It is the industry’s problem. We have to work together as an industry and apply constant pressure at the very highest levels.”

He added, “BeoutQ have been taken down for now but we have to make sure they don’t find a way to come back. Piracy is everywhere in our region. We have to have the latest tools to disrupt attacks, but even with the best tools pirates will learn a way around it.”
Among security solutions presented by Synamedia at the show are a managed service across both broadcast and IP streaming which includes the ability to disrupt leaks immediately without waiting for third-party takedown.

“Taking down an illegal rebroadcast of a football game 45 minutes after the match started is no good,” Racine said.

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“Piracy cannot be solved by technology alone and piracy is not our problem alone. It is the industry’s problem. We have to work together as an industry and apply constant pressure at the very highest levels.” Israel Esteban, beIN Media
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Synamedia also offers an effective way for its Infinite customers to convert viewers of pirated content to legitimate subscribers by replacing basic takedown warnings with notices that encourage viewers to sign up, resulting in new revenue streams.

“Every customer deployment should have security hard wired into it,” said Racine. “We are going to double down on our efforts to ensure the entire video ecosystem works together to reduce consumer confidence in pirated services so demand falls away fast.”

Twelve months from on its emergence at IBC2018 and Synamedia has gained a new CEO in Yves Padrines. He talked of the company’s strategic plan to help realise ambitions to bring together broadcast and OTT services and enable clients to generate new revenue.

“For example, we can reduce workflow complexity and enable bandwidth-efficient, highly scalable delivery from content ingest to display on the OTT device at a latency of just 6 seconds – that’s equivalent to broadcast latency,” he said.

This is made possible by encoding in Common Media Application Format (CMAF) for delivery to to ABR-aware client devices.

He also pointed to Synamedia’s virtualized Digital Content Manager (DCM) which shows how automation using machine learning can optimize quality levels to deliver a premium live OTT viewing experience cost effectively.

Synamedia is previewing content-aware encoding, fuelled by AI and machine learning techniques that incorporates information such as program recurrence, program similarity and genre taken from sources such as program guides and the IMDb database.

“Using pattern matching techniques, operators will be able to predict the required quality/bitrate per program (or event) to optimize the encoding,” Racine said.

Padrines suggested that a new model is required that would enable customers to view their content from a single place, rather than subscribing to disparate applications and services.

“Content is king, but the user experience is queen,” he said.