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Although the broadcast industry has been rife with theft
since the early days of cable TV, it now faces piracy at an industrial scale
and speed. At IBC2025, a panel of security experts warned that illegal
streaming is accelerating in scale, sophistication, and impact.
“Piracy is an existential threat to sports’ economic model,”
said Mark Lichtenhein, CEO of the Sports Rights Owners Coalition (SROC), at
IBC2025.
With 80% of online piracy happening through illegal
streaming services, content is under relentless attack. Unlicensed online video
consumption is estimated to cost the media sector approximately $75bn a year
globally, and is expected to hit $125bn by 2028.
Spilling the beans
While live sports piracy tends to dominate headlines, it is
not the most pirated category of TV content. According to research by Muso, the
illegal consumption of films and episodic TV shows – notably Japanese anime –
drove over 87% of visits to pirate sites in 2024.
While the value of both live sports and premium drama decays
as soon as it is released, on-demand content has a longer time to be exploited,
from script stage through production.
“We track lots of pirate services that have a fully stocked
video on demand (VOD) library of the latest content, often unreleased and
already available for users to stream,” reports Robin Boldon, Head of Product
at an anti-piracy solutions provider Friend MTS. “That sits alongside a
professional electronic program guide with tens of thousands of live channels
from all over the world, all available in one service, for one monthly fee.”
In April 2025, European broadcasters called on the World
Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to adopt a treaty that would protect
member transmissions internationally regardless of where the pirates were
located or where they rebroadcast.
In a joint statement, they said the piracy of broadcast
signals had become a global issue. “The internet facilitates unauthorised use
and distribution of broadcasters’ signals, causing substantial financial harm
to broadcasting organisations. This threatens the commercial sustainability of
live and premium content, which is central to broadcasters’ programming.”
However, it is a mistake to think that pirates are only
hijacking streams or attacking content delivery networks (CDNs). Sometimes the
initial leak happens by accident as a result of a gap in security protocols at
a redistribution partner, a supplier of VFX or versioning, or even within the
production company itself.
Securing the supply chain
This is why research body MovieLabs is advocating for zero
trust, a concept that operates a ‘never trust, always verify’ model. However,
it is finding it to be a massive change management task to get everyone
involved in a production to switch away from years of thinking about security
as physically securing a computer or building, to one in which digital IDs are
the only way to access media held on a network.
Theft is exacerbated by failing digital rights management
systems (DRMs) that haven’t been updated since their introduction 20 years ago.
Earlier in 2025, a report from Enders Analysis called out the weaknesses of
Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine DRMs that the industry has long
relied on as guardrails to keep consumers within the scope of their payTV
subscription. The authors said that due to a lack of maintenance by the big
tech companies, these "are now compromised across various security levels".
“When you've got a core technology that's not necessarily
the biggest revenue driver, then it [may not get] good or regular updates,”
says Boldon. “They don't really provide a barrier to a pirate who's determined
to get access to that content. Equally, even with a solid foundation, if it's
not implemented properly or with the best practice it should be, then you go
out the gate with those vulnerabilities in place.”
Friend MTS has pioneered server (or domain) blocking to
filter out access to pirated services, down to the internet service provider
(ISP) level. “On average, access to nearly 10,000 video servers per live event
is blocked, so what makes server blocking unique is not only its focus on video
delivery servers – versus just front-end pirate services – but rather its
ability to run for the duration of events defined in an order, priming it to
tackle live video content, including sports,” Boldon explains.
CDN leeching is the latest form of piracy to threaten
operators’ revenues and is perhaps one of the most serious ones yet. Alain
Durand, Senior Director at media security specialist Synamedia explains:
“Criminals know how to exploit and distribute encrypted keys to their
subscribers, and they’re sending links directly to the CDN paid by the service
provider to stream the content. Since they don't distribute the content
themselves, they make much more money because they don't have any distribution
costs to restream the content.”
Overall, these security experts advise media organisations
to wrap their entire company culture in zero trust and implement all manner of
defence mechanisms from forensic watermarking to issuing takedown notices.
The power of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest weapon in
security experts’ armoury. Friend MTS collects 27,000 hours of video every day
and millions of data signals related to piracy. According to the company, these
can’t be processed with anything other than AI.
“We use AI in a number of ways. For instance, we use it to
help identify consumer behaviour patterns,” explains Boldon. “Are there
telltale signs we could use to forecast where and when piracy will occur? We
can then offer that guidance to the customer so that the next time, because
there will be a next time, they're better equipped to handle any breach.”
AI can also be used to identify the unauthorised training of
AI models on victims’ intellectual property. “We are actively involved in
R&D to help customers identify where their content has been used or abused
in that fashion and can advise on what they can do about it.”
The high stakes of live sports
Live sports have always been a target of hackers. However,
the rise in the value of sports rights has made these events the most
high-profile cases. Every year, the industry loses an estimated $28bn to
piracy, fuelled by 230 billion views of pirated streams worldwide,
“This is more than lost revenue; it’s an erosion of
exclusivity – the very asset that makes sports rights so valuable,” says Durand.
For live sports, leaks must be detected and disrupted within
minutes. Watermarking combined with real-time takedown capabilities isn’t a
luxury anymore – it’s a business imperative.
Rights owners echo the urgency. Lichtenhein criticised the
lack of clarity in current laws, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, which
requires “expeditious” takedowns but fails to define timeframes. “Expeditious
for a football match must mean minutes, not Monday morning,” Lichtenhein
argued, calling for a legal framework that recognises the unique value of live
events.
Moving forwards
The industry has moved on in its awareness of the issue and
willingness to confront it head-on.
Boldon says, “A couple of years ago, the issue was still
largely considered one for the rights holders to deal with. Now, there’s a much
more collaborative recognition that it's [the industry’s] collective problem.
If there’s a specific regional problem with theft, there is an understanding
that sharing that intelligence and getting the global rights holder on board
can have a positive impact.”
However, just when the industry may be coming to grips with
at least stabilising the amount of pirated content, the advance of new
technologies could render every current encrypted digital system vulnerable to
instant attack.
Quantum computing is on the march. For many experts, it is a
matter of when, not if, a sufficiently capable quantum system is built to pose
a problem that is immense enough to make Y2K look like child’s play for every
single company’s IT department.
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