Irdeto has landed a major win for its conditional access systems with Russian mobile specialist MTS for its 2.7 million TV customers. It is particularly satisfying because it is a region hit hard by media piracy, which has come to be considered perfectly legal.
The release talks about Irdeto being deployed to over 2.0 million subscribers but MTS has 2.7 million so perhaps it is not yet active in all regions. Irdeto’s CA solution delivers the Russian broadcaster’s TV services across nine time zones, representing the majority of Russian territory.
MTS is one of the leading Russian telecom operators, providing mobile and fixed line telecom services to over 100 million subscribers. Irdeto started working with MTS in 2012 in the framework of cable television services, and then became one of the partners for providing satellite services in 2015.
Today, Irdeto CA is present in hundreds of head ends for MTS digital TV, to set-tops and CA modules using a single Key Management System (KMS) across multiple time zones.
Natalia Bratchikova, Marketing Director of the TV Business at MTS, said, “Since our time working together, there have been no piracy cases reported and our relationship has evolved to include engineering workshops and additional support. Irdeto helps us make sure we make the most of the latest technologies.”
Irdeto underlined the issues it faces in Russia by putting out a new piece of research just carried out for it online by YouGov polling 1,005 Russian adults, which shows that 87% of Russian consumers don’t know that online piracy is illegal.
Additional findings show that 57% of Russians polled actively viewed pirated content, 38% of them prefer to pirate movies still in the cinema and 75% most often access pirated content on their laptop. Some 66% think that streaming or downloading pirate content is also legal.
If you go back ten years in Western Europe and the US, you would have got similar results and surveys back then shocked everyone. So it puts Russia about ten years behind the West on the piracy education curve.
As a result, piracy in the region has spiraled with 57% saying they actively watch pirated content and 22% do so at least once a week.
Despite being told that pirating video content results in studios losing money, which affects both the quality and amount of investment in new movies and TV shows, almost half (48%) of those surveyed said it would have no impact on their illegal video consumption. In fact, only 12% of consumers said it makes them want to stop watching pirated content completely, after discovering this fact. This highlights how many consumers do not fully appreciate the negative impact that piracy has on the creation of new, innovative entertainment.
Usually the only thing that changes this attitude is when the local country develops its own fledgling movie industry, as China has, and this spurs local authorities to implement appropriate controls and for educational and sometimes legally punitive efforts, to attack the problem.
In Russia, live sports, OTT original content from Netflix, Hulu and others are not as popular, with all three categories being preferred by fewer than 6% of respondents.