There is almost an element of fatalism surrounding Irdeto’s revelation that video piracy has increased by 45% globally over the last year, fuelled largely by online streaming and downloading. Irdeto is after all one of the leading content security vendors with its history steeped in CAS and is now suggesting that piracy cannot be curbed, but merely managed, calling for content producers to ensure their prize assets are available affordably by legal means in all territories. Irdeto says it can still protect business models, but with the implication firstly that there will always be some leakage and secondly that the model needs to be appealing to consumers to prevent piracy spiraling out of hand.
In that context it is interesting to compare Irdeto’s piracy figures with legal access. Irdeto identifies HBO’s Fantasy Series Game of Thrones as once again the most pirated series, with seasons 1-4 illegally downloaded more than 7 million times between February 5th and April 6th 2015 in the run up to the new season’s premiere on April 12th, up from 4.9 million for the same period of 2014. This is an average of 116,000 illegal downloads per day of Game of Thrones episodes, 36,000 more than last year.
But this is the total for all episodes, while the new season five first episode notched up almost 8 million legitimate same day viewers on its first night this week. That is 1.4 million more same-day viewers than last year’s opener and 800,000 more than its previously most-watched episode to date, which aired on May 18 2014.
So to an extent the hike in piracy reflects the show’s still-increasing popularity, although it looks like there is some net acceleration. Irdeto also has data on other shows over the recent February 5th through April 6th period, although without previous year figures for comparison. The Walking Dead was downloaded 5.7 million times, followed by Breaking Bad on 3.8 million, Vikings on 3.4 million and House of Cards 2.7 million. This does beg the question of whether the level of piracy, high though it is, is presently threatening revenues from these shows. HBO is quite content with its takings from Game of Thrones.
There are some revealing country differences in piracy, with sharpest rises in developing regions where this is explained by improved broadband penetration and bandwidth, increasing the catchment pool for premium online content. There was a 27% decline in illegal downloads for Game of Thrones in the Russian Federation, but an increase in other developing nations led by India, with a 155% rise. Among developed nations, piracy rose by 10% in the US and 30% in the UK, Irdeto indicating here a relationship with availability.
Irdeto has not published data on live sports piracy, which is another area of rapid growth. In the absence of hard data we have to fall back on anecdotal reports that typically one third of all premium sports viewed online is pirated. There are some hard numbers, such as the fact that in 2014 NBC shut down 45,000 illegal video clips of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games for which it had rights.
Live sports is more challenging in the sense that nearly all its value is packed into a short window, so there is very little time to act against infringing streams, with limited value chasing pirates after the event when the revenues have all been lost. On the plus side is the fact that the content emanates from legitimate rights holders’ platforms, so that pirates have to intercept these streams and then rely on available infrastructure to redistribute the content to their “clients.” This gives operators the chance to identify infringing streams quickly with the help of forensic watermarking and take them down in real time, which is already being accomplished with some success. This puts the spotlight even more on platform operators in the battle against piracy of live sports, since they have the relationship with subscribers and know who they are. This gives them the chance to identify the source of illegitimate streams and then subsequently terminate them, whether they are coming from a conventional set top or an OTT service delivered to a computer or mobile device.
Perhaps the problem is that to work on a global scale, content owners must ensure that all their licensed distributors comply with agreed security measures, or else there will be weak links for pirates to exploit. In the case of live sports, such damage may be localized given the impact of latency on global distribution and here it is on-demand content such as movies that is at greatest risk from leaks. In either case, pirates will target broadcasters or operators that are not adhering to best practices, which will become the source for illegitimate feeds.