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The use of card and control word sharing schemes has particularly gained ground in all markets.  These schemes allow illegal distributors to resell subscriptions to a television bouquet at a very low cost.

In order to do so, pirates redistribute the content descrambling keys known as Control Words (CW) which are usually renewed every 10 seconds. The CW’s are redistributed either by internet or by satellite. In the first case, known as card sharing, illegal subscribers need a pirate set-top box (STB) with an IP connection which connects to the service to get the Control Words. In the second case, illegal subscribers need to purchase specific equipment that receives the CW’s and connected to the STB, inject them in the STB.

Viaccess-Orca provides CW protection with trusted STB technology for several years in order to counter this threat. However to help Content Service Providers to fight against CW sharing during their migration from legacy STB to trusted STB that can take several years, Viaccess-Orca provides two innovative anti-piracy services : one against card sharing over the internet and a second one against CW sharing over satellites.

For the first service, Viaccess-Orca screens the card sharing activity on the internet, identifies the shared cards, defines the sanctioning policy with the Provider and deploys the sanctioning policy.

The second service targets CW redistribution over satellite: it consists in analyzing and filtering illegal streams containing CW’s redistributed on satellite networks. 

Peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming networks are becoming a growing trend with an increasing bandwidth usage and improved service quality. This trend is fast becoming an increasing threat for Content Service Providers and Content Owners inducing potential revenue loss and customers acquisition decrease. As an example, Viaccess-Orca observed during the last Euro 2012 finale game (Spain vs. Italy) more than 20 streaming channels using a popular live P2P software, some of them with an audience over 30,000 end-users.

Viaccess-Orca is able to offer relevant services, including P2P Tracker, to the various stakeholders in the content value chain to evaluate the threats and take appropriate decisions. In the long run, being able to unsettle the users of illegal P2P live streaming networks, by degrading whenever possible their user experience, will further help protect the Content Service Providers revenue and preserve the interest of content and rights owners.

The P2P Tracker service includes the following phases:

• Defining a list of targeted events with the Content Service Providers.
• Identifying the P2P networks target from a global database, either by pro-active watch using web-crawlers’ tools or directly by human contacts or social engineering through distribution channels.
• Configuring and launching the P2P Tracker tool.
• Analyzing the collected information.