Filter blogs by:
or

6 Ways to Stop Digital Piracy

With content owners increasingly worried about seeing the value of their investments disappear in the face of concerted piracy attacks, here are 6 ways to stop digital piracy. Updated January 2025.6 ways digital piracy

Looking at the global scope of video content piracy activities, there is cause for hope and cause for alarm. On the one hand, there are increasing industry initiatives that seem to be working and at least stopping the acceleration of TV piracy and more general video piracy; on the other, there are more and more routes for the pirates to get illegal content to the consumer. There is also a constant evolution of the techniques used to pirate content, with new illegal approaches such as CDN Leeching presenting significant and worldwide challenges for some of the biggest names in the industry.

Once upon a time, the barriers to viewing pirated material were significant enough to put many viewers off. Files had to be found on torrent indexing sites, malware, and poor-quality material needed to be sifted out, and the material had to be downloaded, often converted and then coaxed to play on a television set. The picture quality was often poor, and the audio sometimes worse.

New call-to-action

Fast forward a few years, and everything is so much easier. While legitimate viewers have more options than ever before, such as with our Secure Video Player, to watch premium content in high quality, consumers looking for illegal content can also choose from a proliferation of viewing platforms that are live streaming pirated material. The pivot towards app-based television has opened up whole libraries of pirated material on set-top boxes and more.

While there are still more legitimate IPTV services than not, online video content piracy is estimated to be a $75 billion per year problem for the global media sector. This figure is projected to reach $125 billion by 2028, representing an annual growth rate of nearly 11%. Astonishingly it was driven by 141 billion video piracy visits globally in 2023, a 12% increase since 2019. That’s 4468 every second of every day.

Meanwhile, analyst Deloitte says that 25% of surveyed US consumers have used others’ streaming passwords or watched pirated content in the last 12 months.

How can operators combat TV piracy? What are the best strategies to implement? We’ve broken down the anti-piracy protection measures broadcasters and operators can take into six different areas, adapted and updated from a presentation by Olivier Dufour, CEO of France, Motorsport Network, at our TVLS 2018 event.Individually, these techniques are powerful in their own right. However, when implemented holistically within an organization, they represent a new culture of affirmative anti-piracy action that marks a significant step forward in the fight against content pirates and provides a roadmap for greatly reducing the impact of illegal downloading.

Stopping digital piracy in its tracks

1. Remove the Incentive

One of the most effective ways of dealing with piracy is by removing the incentive for consumers to look for pirated content. Effectively, this can be characterised by offering a good product and a good user experience at a fair price. The advent of AVOD-driven services has provided more flexibility than ever with this, as companies are able to provide premium, subscription, and ad-free services alongside cheaper ad-subsidized ones, with a range of different technical options covering picture resolution and a number of devices as well. The result is a tiered approach that is becoming increasingly common worldwide.

There are also differences between approaches in different countries. As of the end of 2024, Netflix's price range in India was $2.32 to $7.56, but it also had a mobile-only offering that cost an even cheaper $1.74 per month (figures are approximate). Indeed, mobile-only offers are increasingly important in emerging economies, and price competition is fierce.

Price, though, is not the only differentiator. The importance of the user experience cannot be understated; viewers want sympathetic interfaces that contain the usual sophisticated bells and whistles, such as personal recommendations, and they want excellent picture quality with no buffering and/or latency. The more the industry can provide that at a realistic cost, the fewer people will be driven towards pirate arms.

You are not going to stop everyone from watching pirated content, but this can remove some of the more casual illegal consumers using digital piracy services.

2. PR & Education

There are several strands to this, but effectively the goal is to highlight to the consumer that video piracy is a crime and it is illegal. To those within the industry, this is obvious; to those outside it, it is anything but.

Netflix’s actions on password sharing illustrate how effective action in this area can be. The company started its password-sharing crackdown in 2022 and estimated at the time that 100 million accounts were sharing passwords with people outside their households.  30 million of these were in the US alone. While a strong backlash was originally forecast against the action, in the end this failed to appear and the company rapidly added 50 million subscribers to its total. 

Of course, not all of these will have been password-sharers, but enough are that other streamers such as Disney+ have implemented their own programs of action, which tend to be a mix of nudge therapy and education.

In short, efforts made to remind viewers that piracy is both morally wrong and a crime can prove successful in driving down piracy numbers. Also successful have been campaigns that have highlighted the role of organized crime in pirate activities, the dangers of exposure to malware and inappropriate material, and the reputational damage to advertisers of negative brand association with pirate sites.

3. Barriers to Entry

In the same way that you want to make it easy for consumers to choose legal alternatives, you want to make it hard for the pirates. The era of unprotected content is long gone. Content owners looking to protect their investment and Intellectual Property will only strike licensing deals with operators that can demonstrate that they take such threats to the revenue stream seriously in turn.

What that means in practice is changing all the time. Where once card-based conditional access systems (CAS) were as sophisticated as operators could get, the move towards IP and OTT delivery has necessitated a transition to software-based digital rights management (DRM). Even so, there is no single technology that can guarantee security.

The best practice now involves a multi-disciplinary approach that encompasses both prophylactic anti-piracy measures and the next two items on this list governing detection and enforcement as well. It’s well illustrated by something such as the MovieLabs Specification for Enhanced Content Protection (ECP). Version 1.4 was released in August 2024 and includes watermarking, advanced DRM capabilities such as using different keys per track (to secure premium content), key rotation, and device filtering/revocation.

4. Technology & Operations

You can’t fight ghosts; you need to know what content is being pirated and where. That means being able to identify content, a live pirate stream, as having come from your own video ecosystem. That requires technical intervention at the pre-transmission stage. Monitoring is the key to success here, whether automated — and there are some interesting developments in AI monitoring of video streams, deployed and under development — or human-led. In an ideal world, at least for now, a hybrid solution is typically deployed.

Once a breach has been detected, swift action is necessary to deal with it. This has become ever-more important in recent years as piracy has pivoted towards real-time streaming and the lucrative illegal revenue streams associated with live sport in particular (the premium prices paid for accessing sports content making it a particular target).

Here, high-level agreements with the search engines and social networks consumers use to locate pirated content are key to rapid and real-time action.

5. Legal & Enforcement

TV service providers can use a variety of countermeasures to interrupt and remove pirated content, from traditional take-down notices to increasingly sophisticated real-time messages. With the correct anti-piracy services, operators can identify consumers who are watching illegal streams and incentivize them to switch to legitimate services. These actions scale from soft to hard, with the harder countermeasures involving the introduction of law enforcement authorities.

The key is speed. While prosecution will always be a much slower process that happens after the event, removing the content from the internet as swiftly as possible is the best way to deter pirates and drive consumers towards legal alternatives.

6. Cooperation

While companies at all levels of the broadcast chain are used to competition, the losses to content piracy are too great for there not to be concerted efforts at cooperation. These need to take place at all levels of the industry and at all steps of the process, from production and on-set content security through to transmission. Organizations such as AAPA and the AVIA’s Coalition Against Piracy already play important roles in coordinating action.

The concept of herd immunity which is such a crucial aspect of global vaccination programs, is important here. The more companies and organisations that are involved, the more effective the overall solution. Unfortunately, the converse can also be true, and if there is any weak spot in the chain at any point, even in a place far removed from what was considered to be the primary route to the consumer’s television or device, that weakness is there to be exploited.

How to stop digital piracy for good

How to avoid piracy? The short answer is that you can’t. While content is being made and broadcasters and operators are charging a price for providing it to their viewers, there will always be pirates looking to exploit that relationship between supply and demand and turn it to their own advantage. What has changed over the past few years is that this has progressed from what was effectively a hobbyist industry to a serious criminal enterprise with equally serious consequences for the industry as well.

But while you cannot halt content piracy, you can mitigate against it. These six ways to prevent piracy that we have covered here are a start. There is, of course, a lot more detail that can be put on these too. For more information, you can find out about how VO's sophisticated Anti-Piracy Services operate and/or download a white paper on the subject here.

6 Ways to Stop Digital Piracy
11:21

Mélanie Langlois

Mélanie Langlois is VO's Product Manager, Anti-Piracy Services. Based in France, she joined VO in 2023 after working for seven years as a Senior Information Technology Project Manager at Orange Business Services. Prior to that she worked worldwide for a variety of high-profile companies, including TradingScreen, Credit Agricole, and ActiveViam. She has a Masters in Computer Sciences and Biotechnologies from Université de Poitiers.