Broadcasters and streamers pay billions of pounds to acquire the rights to major sports events, but without the rights security foundation in place, they can be susceptible to the growing number of illegal streamers.
Nivedita Nouvel, VP of products and solutions marketing at Broadpeak, tells TVBEurope why getting the right technology in place to deal with piracy issues means protecting the future of the industry.
What are some of the common security issues facing streaming platforms and content providers today?
There’s a broad spectrum of security threats affecting streaming platforms and content providers, ranging from general IT vulnerabilities to video-specific concerns. On the software side, issues include tampering with software integrity, unsafe login management practices, lack of user privacy safeguards, and large-scale denial of service attacks like DDoS or SYN floods.
When it comes to video, the challenges are more specialised. Access tokens can be shared or forged, subscription limits are often exceeded through credential abuse, and content can be retrieved from regions where it’s not legally available. There’s also the risk of automated catalogue scraping, where malicious actors harvest and mirror entire content libraries. Each of these issues not only impacts revenue but also damages the trust that users place in the service.
How have issues around streaming piracy changed or got worse in recent times?
Parks Associates forecasts that global revenue losses due to password sharing and content piracy could reach $113 billion by 2027, with piracy rates for US TV and film increasing from 22 per cent in 2022 to 24.5 per cent by that time. Just last year, Italian authorities dismantled a major piracy ring in that was illicitly serving content to over 22 million users, leading to an estimated €3 billion in annual damages. Studies typically show that 10–30 per cent of paid content is pirated, depending on the country, and that delivery systems are seeing a steep rise in targeted cyberattacks. The wider geopolitical climate is also playing a factor here, with a number of newly enforced national regulations aimed at reinforcing critical infrastructure security. Frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework in the US and the UK’s Telecom Security Act are driving a more proactive approach to cyber resilience within media networks.
What more can be done to help broadcasters prevent piracy issues?
A layered defence strategy is essential. First, streaming services should pre-emptively scan and filter incoming traffic — blocking unauthorised connections based on protocol violations, port usage, or blacklisted IPs before they reach core servers. Platforms should also adopt centralised monitoring to correlate traffic across servers. This allows real-time detection of suspicious behaviour, such as access tokens being reused by multiple IPs or unusually high request volumes from a single source. Automated mitigation rules can also be deployed to take action when specific thresholds are exceeded, flagging suspicious connection sessions for automatic reporting, shut-off and quarantine across the delivery network. Finally, machine learning-based anomaly detection provides a more dynamic layer of protection. By identifying deviations from typical usage patterns, platforms can uncover novel attack strategies that predefined security rules may miss.
How are streaming technology platforms – and their security partners – evolving to address some of these challenges?
We’re seeing encouraging progress across the industry as core streaming technology platforms and partner security vendors work closer together to build more resilient systems. The shift toward embedding security directly into the video delivery chain is a significant development. Rather than relying exclusively on external appliances, hardware firewalls, load balancers or reactive measures, several advanced streaming technology platforms now integrate real-time threat detection, traffic monitoring, and mitigation tools within the cache itself. This allows for immediate responses to threats like token abuse, scraping, and DDoS-style attacks, while also supporting secure, low-latency content delivery, crucial for live streaming. We’ve retained a laser focus on improving security features across our caching and edge computing software, helping streaming companies and operators build more modern, high-performance CDNs that enable greater scale while empowering stronger anti-piracy measures.
What’s your one key message for the industry on tackling streaming piracy?
Streaming services live and die by their ability to scale their audience and grow sustainable revenues — but neither are possible without the right security foundations in place. Fighting piracy in real-time is table stakes for services that want to grow their subscriber base to its maximum potential. It’s also essential for securing hard-earned returns on billion-dollar rights deals and ensuring long-term profitability. As core streaming technology providers, it’s on us to help service providers and streaming platforms detect piracy as it happens. Getting it right means protecting the future of our industry.
