Summary
- The recent Summer Olympics had a significant digital viewership, with billions of minutes streamed globally, leading to increased incidents of sports piracy.
- Watermarking has emerged as a key technology in the fight against sports video piracy, offering advantages such as speed, robustness, multi-device support, and scalability.
- Watermarking is invisible to users and does not impact the viewing experience, making it compliant with content owner requirements.
- The solution is available as a server-side option, ensuring flexibility, quick deployment, and cost-effectiveness, while also integrating with leading equipment in streaming workflows.
A summer of piracy
The recent Summer Olympics highlights how much the sports broadcasting landscape has changed in recent years. Estimated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to have been the ‘most digital’ Olympics ever, online audiences streamed billions of minutes from Paris 2024 worldwide. And they could do this thanks to massive investments in live streaming technologies that saw rights-holding broadcasters able to stream up to 55 events simultaneously.
However, if it has been a summer of sport, it has also been a summer of sports piracy. Those streams were typically paywalled with free-to-air rights being much more limited. This has created high demand for illegal services, and the IOC had to be extremely active in policing rights as a result. Amongst other actions, it worked with the French authorities to block 25 websites for the duration of the Olympics and Paralympics, and requested that Google delist thousands of websites from its results.
Elsewhere, in Spain LaLiga says it has now convicted over 1000 bars of illegal screening soccer matches. Meanwhile, according to the EUIPO’s recent IP perception study, 12% of EU citizens access or stream sports content from illegal online sources.
This number rises to 27% among young people aged 15-24 with 47% of Bulgarian youth admitting to such activities. This is followed by Spain and Greece at 42%, Slovenia at 39%, and Ireland at 34%.
And if 12% off EU citizens doesn’t sound consequential, it’s worth pointing out that it represents nearly 54 million people. Scale that up to a global population and, even if you just count TV households rather than individuals, you have somewhere in the region of 210 million households illegally streaming sports content. That’s a lot of people and a lot of revenue being siphoned away from legitimate businesses by the pirates.
Anti-piracy action
How can rights holders fight against this growing phenomenon, which undermines not just their rights but their earnings? One of the key anti-piracy technologies that has been demonstrated to be extremely effective against sports video piracy is watermarking. Dynamic watermarking enables rights holders to quickly locate and block piracy at its source. And speed is of the essence here. It has been estimated that the opportunity window to discourage audiences from consuming illegal streams is as short as 15 minutes. Extraction, detection, and cessation all must follow each other smoothly and seamlessly for action to be taken.
This is why watermarking has become a popular answer to stemming losses to pirates and is being increasingly specified by content owners. It is fast and it is reliable, allowing action to be taken at the individual user level. Furthermore, this can be done at source without having to involve much slower legal processes such as domain blocking.
Alongside speed of revocation, this tool brings other noted advantages in the fight against content piracy, and live sports in particular:
- Robustness: Watermarking can be engineered to be resistant to collusion, which is the main attack used by sophisticated pirate networks to remove the watermark from the video
- Multi-device support: An anti-piracy strategy must work on as many devices as possible. While fragmentation will always be a challenge, as watermarking is a software-based solution, it must work across all devices that play video, from Connected TVs to smartphones to desktops, including legacy devices.
- User experience: Watermarks should be invisible and not impair the end-user experience, which makes it fully compliant with content owner requirements. Pristine 4K HDR images remain pristine 4K HDR images.
- Scalability: Cloud deployment allows watermarking to swiftly scale to requests from a huge number of devices and users and accommodate the spikes often associated with live sports
Above and beyond this list, there are also attributes that our own solution brings to the table.
It offers real-time adaptation, changing on the fly and reacting to pirate threats even as the pirates try to evolve their attacks and breach the system. Because it is a dynamic watermarking solution, that means it doesn’t need to know the content in advance and it is independent of the hardware and device used. That makes it a low-latency solution and one that does not add lag to the production workflow. This is critical to ensure that live sports remain as live as possible and a huge factor in ensuring viewer contentment with any service.
And crucially it is now also available as a server-side solution. This dramatically increases the flexibility of our watermarking, negating any worries about fragmentation and allowing us to provide it as-a-service and even on a per-event basis. It is also quick to deploy, and has already been integrated into leading equipment from manufacturers creating the critical components of a streaming workflow, and more cost-effective than ever before.
Holistic strategy
It is important to recognize that impacting video piracy involves multiple strategies. If you have content that people want to access, such as live streams of sporting events, bad actors will always seek to find a way in. Video piracy in 2024 is sophisticated, organized, and can have a customer-facing front end that is indistinguishable from legitimate services.
The viewer may not even know that they are watching illegal content. But sporting organisations using watermarking technology can look at the same picture and quickly ascertain where it is coming from, precisely where the breach is, and move to shut that particular stream off while the event is still underway. And as part of an overall strategy that prioritises content security at all points in the chain, that is a powerful weapon to have on your side.
