Veramatrix Streamkeeper Puts Those Fighting Piracy in a Proactive Position for Battle

The approach is based on prevention and making production of illegal streams inconvenient and/or risky

The challenge of effectively fighting piracy of live sports streaming is daunting. Not only is it difficult to track down the source of the illegal streams, but, more often than not, by the time the stream is shut down, the live sports event is already over. Verimatrix is one of the companies hoping to change that with an innovative approach to combating piracy.

But the battle is about more than just technology. It is also about hearts and minds as the mix of professional skinned pirated services plus a sense that it is a victimless crime continues to make preventing it more challenging, both technically and society-wide.

The public views pirated content, whether live streams or VOD assets, as very innocent, says Juan Martinez Puig, VP, product management, anti-piracy, Verimatrix. The perception from society is also seen as Oh, you're a pirate, that's pretty cool.' Nobody feels that piracy is a big problem from a crime perspective. It's not violent, so people feel they won't be caught or that maybe their service gets taken down but then another one pops up in minutes.

Verimatrix's Juan Martinez Puig at IBC 2026One of the big challenges, he notes, is that setting up an illegal streaming operation is beyond simple.

You don't need a lot of equipment, Martinez Puig explains. You literally need a laptop, and you can do it from anywhere in the world. That accessibility is the whole story because people don't stop pirating because they've been persuaded it's wrong; they stop when it becomes inconvenient, risky, or both.

There are two main attack vectors in the market, he adds. One is that it's quite easy to extract the most-used DRMs as the platforms are not as secure as they should be. If somebody's able to obtain a DRM license, they are able to extract the key. That means that they can access the content directly from the CDN provider, where they can access the content and decrypt it anytime.

The other attack that is very easy to achieve, he continues, is basically hijacking the authentication that happens between the applications and the services. By hijacking it, the pirate can derive the license for another device, extract the key, and issue it to others.

Verimatrix's answer is its Streamkeeper suite, which is based on a game-changing philosophy: instead of crawling the internet for illegal streams, racing to shut them down, and being in reactive mode, Streamkeeper is designed to make piracy prohibitively difficult before it gets a foothold.

We're turning the tables on that aspect, Martinez Puig explains. If we're only reacting, trying to detect the anomalies happening and shut down the new one, we're always chasing the pirates. That's never going to end.

The approach works on two fronts simultaneously. First, the content itself is encrypted and protected through Multi-DRM. Second, and this is where Verimatrix differentiates itself, the technology verifies that any application, web client, or set-top box requesting content is the legitimate device that should be making the request. The authentication token connecting an app to a service is cryptographically tied to the device that generated it; try to move that token to another device, and the system recognizes the mismatch and discards it instantly. Combine that with protection that prevents the underlying key from being extracted in the first place, and a would-be pirate is left with neither a working credential nor an extractable key - no realistic way to build a piracy service at all.

It's completely invisible, says Martinez Puig of the user experience. That's what you want from security: to be as transparent as possible and not disturb the user experience.

When the system does detect tampering, its response is proportional: it can block access outright, degrade video quality, or simply surface a warning message, escalating only as far as the threat requires.

The differentiator, adds Martinez Puig, is visibility on both sides of the transaction. A CDN-only vendor sees the delivery side and has to infer what a suspicious application is doing. Verimatrix sees both: what the app is doing and how the communication between app and service is behaving. And that lets it correlate signals and act with far more precision.

The dual view is already protecting roughly 15 million application instances across the company's customer base. It's delivered as a continuous SaaS subscription because, as Martinez Puig puts it, the threat landscape never stops moving. The security is continuously being renewed, continuously being monitored. You always need to watch for new attack vectors.

Another way Verimatrix can help in the fight is that it has the intelligence to allow subscribers to have their credentials travel with them when they're away from home, a move that again prevents frustrated consumers from searching out illegal options. Verimatrix's technology can determine, without identifying an individual, whether a request is coming from a genuine application, a VPN, or a shared IP pool, giving operators the confidence to build smarter access rules for subscribers legitimately abroad. The goal is to create friction for the pirates and no friction for the end users, because every moment of unnecessary hassle for a paying customer is a moment when they might turn to an illegal service.

Our message is, prevention first, says Martinez Puig. Then add watermarking, add services to detect what is happening, just to detect the last ones. There will be always somebody who thinks they should be having a pirate setup and will do those more technically challenged operations.

There's a real business case beneath this strategy

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/10/12/veramatrix-streamkeeper-puts-th...
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