IBC
article here
Live sports is the battlefield as AI plays both sword and
shield in the ongoing war with piracy.
Piracy of sports streaming is rampant. So much so that
an ESPN reporter was accused of watching an illegal streaming site
when he posted a comment relating to a recent NFL game on social media.
Meanwhile, having paid €400m a season for rights to cover
France’s top football division, Ligue 1, sports streamer DAZN set a target of
1.5 million subscribers only to find that in the first week of its
broadcasts around 200,000 people were illicitly streaming its coverage.
Cybercrime is endemic according to anti-piracy solutions
vendor Synamedia which suggests the sports industry is missing out on $28bn
a year as a result. Even that figure, calculated in league with Ampere
Analysis, accepts that a hardcore 26% of viewers will never pay.
“Piracy is exacerbated by the fragmented content market,”
says Tim Pearson, Product, Solution and Partner Marketing Leader at Nagra.
“There’s anecdotal consumer feedback that says ‘I’ve paid for two or three
services, I can’t pay for any more so I’ll access this one through a much
cheaper service’. The problem is that many consumers don’t realise that they
are buying into a criminal enterprise that is probably harvesting data from
them as well.”
Werner Strydom, Head of Advanced Technology and Innovation,
Irdeto, says: “There is more live streaming piracy than in the past
because live is the most valuable content to try and monetise
with a pirate business model.”
AI sword
AI is escalating the problem. For example, Generative AI is
accelerating the process by which pirates can create teasers, clip content and
publish on social media to drive audiences to their platform.
Pearson says: “Pirates run sophisticated marketing
organisations and AI is making their fake content look as good as if it were
created by someone like the BBC. When content looks this professional, it dupes
the consumer into thinking that the site must be legitimate.”
From a forensics perspective, the use of AI by pirates is a
genuine concern. High-value content like a Champions League football match is
embedded with a watermark that is so subtle that pirates find it difficult to
determine whether it’s present or not, let alone remove it.
“Usually, [pirates] do a lot of content manipulation in the
hope that if there’s a watermark present, it damages it to such a degree that
you can’t read it again,” says Strydom. “With AI they probably no longer have
to guess; they will know for a fact.”
Similar risks are now occurring with upscaling. “Even if
pirates have stolen a crappy SD version, they can upscale it to HD. That used
to take a lot of processing and video editing skills but AI has made it a lot
easier.”
That upscaling process can also scrub away the watermark.
AI shield
The shield side of the picture is that AI is also
accelerating defensive capabilities. Andy Haynes, SVP of Engineering at Friend
MTS, an anti-piracy provider which counts UEFA among its clients, says: “AI is
a really hot topic. There’s a lot of misinformation going around about how
vulnerable the industry might be to AI, but it can also be extremely useful.
The real value for AI is going to be in a lot of small things that help us work
more efficiently, rather than one big system that just fixes everything for
you.”
He reports: “We’ve seen cases where people have got a TV on
in the background and they’re effectively doing the commentary with the live
broadcast. It’s not the same content as was originally broadcast but we can
start to use AI to detect that and then investigate further.”
The power of AI mostly comes down to automating what used to
be an extremely manual workflow. A lot of metadata gets added manually based on
human judgement and with human interpretation of the results. The latest
generations of AI are making it a lot easier to automate those processes.
“It’s not completely taking the human out of the loop, and I
doubt that will ever be the case,” says Strydom. “But what it certainly does is
make it possible for us to extend the scope of our [web] crawling to look for
piracy and to process a much larger quantity of potential piracy candidates.”
Dealing with live piracy requires responding to an illegal
stream within minutes of an event having started, and according to Pearson,
this is a major area where AI can help in triggering and accelerating workflows
automatically.
“If an algorithm detects a watermark or a fingerprint of
content that’s distributed illegally, the model is also smart enough to be able
to react and deal with it,” he says. “You can scan for a lot more patterns and
do a lot more pattern matching with AI than you can do conventionally.”
For a popular live event, there may be tens of thousands of
potential streams that need to be investigated, but only a fraction are
relevant to the actual event requiring protection. “Step one is differentiating
between what is in scope and what is out of scope,” says Strydom. “Using AI to
make a judgement call about whether something is tennis or football or some
other sport is an established capability.”
On top of that, logo recognition can be added to filter out
legitimate candidates. The next step might be to issue takedown notices to the
few streams that are left. There are, however, risks of scooping up legal
streams in the trawl.
“A lot of operators are not entirely comfortable with
takedowns being completely automated,” Strydom continues. “Instead, they may
try to prioritise known pirates who are causing the most harm from a brand or
revenue perspective, and not worry too much about the smaller guys. Many
operators are willing to accept a certain degree of piracy because they don’t
want to create too much disruption for the legitimate customer base.”
In Italy, anti-piracy platform Piracy Shield –
which has been in operation since the beginning of this year and is managed by
the nation’s media regulator to protect sports rights on behalf of Prime Video,
DAZN, and Sky – has managed to take down legitimate providers on more than one
occasion.
“Clearly that’s not a good thing,” Haynes says. “We don’t
want that to happen [to us]. We have a certain amount of reticence about using
AI in that decision-making process for the very reason that if it gets it
wrong, the negative consequences are pretty staggering.”
Haynes says police forces are similarly hesitant about using
AI in pre-emptive decision making. “They can use it for pattern analysis and to
predict where things might happen, but it’s usually a very robust process when
it comes to enforcement because you have to be able to stand by how you’ve
reached a conclusion. It’s not good enough to just say ‘That’s what the model
spat out’. You’ve got to have the actual evidential chain.”
Minority report
One of the most compelling ways AI could transform the
battle against sports piracy is through advanced content recognition and
detection systems. Could algorithms predict potential instances of piracy
before they occur?
Haynes is sceptical. “I wouldn’t like to say ‘never’, but I
don’t think you’d need to detect it before it appears so much as you just need
to find it sooner. Especially for boxing matches or events that can be over
very quickly, the time taken to respond is hugely important.
“You can assume people will be trying to pirate an event and
you could probably use some AI behavioural analysis to judge where to look. You
don’t necessarily need to recover the stolen goods, but you need to have enough
evidence to suggest that someone is committing a crime. We have techniques in
place in certain areas that look for indicators of piracy to support that
evidential chain,” he says.
Irdeto’s Strydom says it is possible to predict piracy based
on subtle signals that have been accumulated as data sets, as a result of
interactions by customers with call centres and conditional access broadcast
systems.
“The patterns are so subtle that a human probably can’t see
anything wrong with it but if the data set were large enough and you train a
model on ‘normal behaviour’ versus abnormal behaviour, it may be able to filter
for possible pirates. Whether you’d go a step further and pre-empt piracy
before it happens, I’m not sure. It sounds a little sci-fi, even a little
scary. We’re not experimenting with anything in that area right now.”
Disrupt to desist
Disruption is sometimes better than cessation, especially
when blocking streams becomes a game of whack-a-mole. “Shut down a pirate
stream, another one will open up. Whereas if you disrupt the
experience, it is less easy for the pirate to monitor,” Pearson says. “That’s
where AI can really disrupt the operation. For example, you could put up an
overlay on the illegal stream to tell viewers it’s not authentic but they can
scan a QR code and watch the rest of the game legitimately.”
Various other counter measures can be deployed using AI that
will disrupt the viewing experience. “Ultimately, it’s not necessary to always
kill the stream, but to make it such a bad experience that subscribers are
going to give up trying cheap versions that don’t work and will then convert
back to paying subscribers.”
AI-driven dynamic pricing models
Another possible deterrent is to alter the price of
legitimate streams depending on precise consumer analytics based on their
preferences and local market.
“It’s definitely possible,” says Pearson. “In fact, one of
our products (Insight Negotiation Agent) uses AI in a virtual call centre
agent, so if a customer thinks they’re paying too much for sports they could
re-negotiate a new price within the guardrail set by the operators, via the
virtual customer agent.
“That technology is here. Dynamic pricing on a match day is
also possible. However, you’ve got to be careful that your core paid-up
subscribers don’t lose out to people who are paying a third less after
converting from a pirate service. It’s a balance, and tricky to do on a match
day if you’re working on a pay-per-view basis.”
After DAZN had its nose bloodied on the first weekend of its
Ligue 1 coverage, it offered a temporary discount on its monthly subscription
fees (from €39.99 to €19.99) in an attempt to address pricing concerns.
According to a survey from French market research and polling company
Odoxa, Nearly two-thirds (65%) of French football fans believe the cost of a
subscription to DAZN will encourage more illegal streaming of Ligue 1.
“The price was enough to drive the illicit behaviour,” says
Pearson. “Once DAZN reduced the price and deployed a load of counter-piracy
measures they saw an improvement.”
No AI silver bullet
Experts emphasise that tackling the criminals requires a
belt-and-braces and straitjacket approach.
“There’s always something new coming along that will thwart
whatever model you’ve already built,” Haynes says. “Pirates try to keep in
business by avoiding detection, so we find that some of the things we’ve done
in the past don’t always work the second time around.”
Nagra research quotes an operator of a pirate organisation
whose candid response was to call it a game of ‘who can outwit the other the
quickest’. “Just because pirates are using AI, that doesn’t mean that the
industry isn’t using AI,” says Pearson. “So for every benefit the pirate gets,
the industry also gets another one.”
There are no signs that cybercriminals are using AI to break
the cryptography associated with the digital rights management (DRM) system,
yet. Irdeto’s Strydom calls it “an arms race”, but also that there does seem to
be greater awareness among clients that security is no longer something that
can be skimped on.
“For a long time, anti-piracy has been seen as a ‘nice to
have’, not an imperative; almost as if operators were asking why they should
police the net,” he says. “Now that they can quantify losses due to piracy in
cold financial terms, we’re seeing a change in anti-piracy attitudes.
“For years everybody talked about multi-DRM, but that is now
just a hygiene factor. Operators are learning they need a lot more than that.”
No comments:
Post a Comment