Content piracy is a huge problem. While the issue isn’t new—dishonest elements have tried to steal media for as long as it has been recordable—the advent of digitalisation has brought with it an exponential increase in the theft of intellectual property. The days of dubious DVD copies of the latest blockbuster, furtively filmed on a camcorder smuggled into the local multiplex, are very much in the past. Today’s content thieves are innovative, agile and highly motivated. Piracy is big business, and unfortunately, it’s a growth industry.
The crime takes many forms, with the figures involved hard to believe. A study commissioned by a group of rightsholders working in collaboration with the European Union to gather data on illicit streaming revealed a “huge surge” at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025. Upwards of 120 million illegal streams were detected across the period, and although take-down notices were served, the data suggested just 11 per cent were disrupted in a timely manner.
This statistic highlights another aspect of the challenge: industry groups are lobbying policymakers for change, but bureaucratic sclerosis ensures legislation continues to lag behind the pace of technological change. As an example, the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance, a group representing members from across the media and entertainment space, is eagerly anticipating clarification from European lawmakers as to the exact definition of the word “expeditious” where it appears in legislation designed to combat illicit streaming.
Furthermore, a Grant Thornton report in March 2025 found there had been, “little to no reduction” in piracy levels in the preceding two years with no meaningful action from online intermediaries to stop the pirates.
Big business
Speaking at a panel discussion titled, Piracy—undermining sports, threatening businesses, funding crime, at IBC2025, Dave Gilmore, VP of intelligence at Friend MTS, revealed another deeply concerning number: over the past year the company had detected more than nine million incidences of piracy. Perhaps indicating the seriousness with which international lawmakers are taking the subject, a senior representative of Interpol’s IP crime and digital piracy unit was also present at the discussion. The piracy business has become analogous with the cocaine trade, albeit one with reduced risks for those who perpetrate it, be they organised criminal groups or other bad actors.
Some might see the situation as a “forever war”, a perpetual digital arms race in which both sides continually evolve to gain an advantage. Others, while accepting some degree of loss will always be inevitable, suggest this is defeatist, and that building a robust defence is entirely possible by adopting the right technological and legislative approach.
The latter view is shared by Robin Boldon. In his role as strategic product leader at Friend MTS, Boldon comes face-to-face with piracy on a frequent basis. He begins by explaining the scale of the challenge.
“It is a big problem for our industry,” he says. “The more [content] that we make available, the more diverse means of access to that content, inevitably, the attack surface for pirates becomes ever greater. And moving from more traditional forms of broadcast infrastructure to complete big, global ones just makes the process so much easier [for bad actors] to take what they want.”
Fortunately, rightsholders have largely recognised the need for effective security strategies, as Boldon confirms. “We’ve seen a number of big customers who have really focused on this,” he says, “because they see it as a means to protect the revenue they generate. Whether it be through subscriptions or, where exclusive rights are auctioned to the highest bidder in a territory, part of the commercial transaction is an obligation to ensure that exclusivity is underpinned by [having] good protocols in place.”
Taking a holistic approach
Outlining the extent to which content is vulnerable, he continues by highlighting the need for a holistic approach. “You can have a licensee that’s got really good security policy, good hygiene, and is doing a good localised programme, then you have another licensee who’s doing nothing. The pirate doesn’t really care where the content comes from. They’ll just import it into the market because it’s all online without borders, and you can use that content wherever. It’s really important that the rights holders think of it in total.”
In a world that is increasingly interconnected, media and entertainment cannot exist in its own bubble and a number of high-profile cyber attacks have already had significant impact. Boldon considers the implications and looks at where content privacy crosses over into the wider cybersecurity landscape, as well as specific areas where M&E is uniquely vulnerable.
“There have been some big attacks in recent years on well-known studios and other media organisations. But I think what’s really challenging for our industry is that we have quite a transient workforce as well, particularly the production cycle,” he states. “[Individuals] come into work on a production and then they go away again. They work on something else. They’re not employees of a static corporation. They are often self-employed, freelancing, technical people and so forth.”
The short-term nature of some productions, which can, says Boldon, resemble large businesses in size, necessitates the creation of many endpoints, each of which widens the attack surface presented to bad actors.“Often, it’s a mistake [that] causes content to leak out,” he says, explaining the need to both identify content and make it trackable, and once again referring to the need for an overarching approach.“We use a variety of techniques to do that. One of them is called forensic watermarking. It’s quite a holistic approach, in that we’ll mark the content, but it also forms part of our monitoring capability. So when we’re looking in all of the myriad places online for where [it] is made available, because it’s baked into our solution, we can find those marks very quickly and effectively help the client shut down that source.”
Fast action is imperative. This is particularly the case in sports broadcasting, where the value of content has a finite life.
”If you think about a [football] match, for example, if you’re not effective in minutes, then you might as well not bother,” says Boldon. “If it gets to halftime, it’s game over. If it’s a pay-per-view boxing match, it could all be over in seven minutes. You’ve got to be very effective as quickly as possible.”
For content owners, best practices should be considered from the start, Boldon believes. “First of all, we would always recommend that [owners] look at best practice when designing and building platforms,” he says. “A lot of the technologies that are chosen, if they’re implemented correctly, perform exactly as expected. But often, they’re not implemented correctly. Shortcuts are taken. They have to meet a budget or a deadline.”
A solution might be white labelled, he continues, but it has the same vulnerabilities as the “ten other cookie-cutter streaming solutions using the same design patterns—and the pirate knows exactly which soft bit to push, which vulnerability to exploit, which key to use again, and again, and again. [Content owners] have to make sure they have best practice in place when designing these things from the ground up.
“And then, there comes a point when consumers’ eyeballs watch your content. That’s another attack vector. [Pirates will] always choose the path of least resistance. So if you make it difficult to get into the encrypted domain, they won’t. They’ll wait until it’s at the end, or they’ll buy a subscription, or they’ll do whatever they need, and then they can take that content and redistribute it.”
Best practice would be to take a layered approach, Boldon explains, with a programme that adds in extra lines of defence “Put forensic marking in the content and you can shut down abuse, but equally, make sure you’ve got good fraud detection protocols in place when people are signing up for your services. So it’s kind of working in concert with all of those different areas to be as effective as you possibly can be.”
Acceptance and understanding seems to be the key to success. While legislators have a role to play, it is increasingly clear that the responsibility is a shared one, in which everyone in the supply chain has a part to play.
“I think better understanding and knowledge of all the different participants in the ecosystem is really, really important,” says Boldon, before concluding on an upbeat note. “I’d like to think that there is an effective balance. I’d like to think there is absolutely a way in which you understand you’ll always have people that will take things from you and build it into your business model.”
The arms race may not yet be over, but with the right strategies in place content owners can keep closing the doors on the pirates, minimise their losses and help to safeguard the future of the industry.
- This article appeared in the October/November issue of TVBEurope, available to download free here
