Rising to the Challenge - Protecting Live Sports Streaming

For sports fanatics like me, the most wonderful time of the year is quickly approaching. Baseball playoffs, the NBA season, college and professional football, World Cup football (yes! Costa Rica is in the field) - the choices are limited only to the amount of time I'll be able to dedicate to the couch.

Besides time to dedicate, fanatic consumers have other challenges. First up is where and how to watch all the sporting events live. Its becoming a pain to keep track of where each event is airing. It shouldnt be this difficult to follow my favorite team, but unfortunately, thats become an event in itself these days. Google becomes my default starting point; more on that later.

And secondly, given the economy and inflation, consumer resources arent endless. The number of streaming video services available to consumers continues to rise. A March 2022 Kagan Consumer Insights survey revealed that U.S. internet households now use an average of 6.8 streaming video services. At some point, even the most rabid fan base will have to make decisions on their subscription and live event expenses.

Live is different

Why do we love sports? Because the live action is unpredictable and immediate. These same qualities are what make protecting live sports difficult. As highlighted during a recent CDSA Content Protection Summit featuring NAGRA, live sports have a time criticality component when it comes to protection. The key is to do something to stop piracy during the live window of the content; otherwise, all the value is gone. Sending a takedown notice after the event is over is a flawed process. You won't see the piracy 4-5 days after the fact, as it only happened for the 90-minute live event window. You need immediate, not expedited, action.

Proactive efforts are key - offense is the best defense

For our industry to proactively protect valuable live sports content, we must collectively utilize all efforts - we cannot rely on legislation, technology, or enforcement alone. Like any championship team, all members must play their positions intelligently and effectively. What does that look like?

Consumer awareness

Back to my earlier point on Google. The harder it is for me to figure out where the big event is airing, the more likely I will utilize search engines to find it. This opens the door to illicit services that often look genuine to consumers. Enticing consumers means they quickly adapt their consumption behavior, thus creating a perfect storm of business issues for both content owners and distributors. And ultimately, when faced with a well-branded pirate service, who wouldn't take up a deal offering every live sporting event for an attractive price?

Its incumbent on our industry to make finding and accessing live sports content easier. We also need to educate consumers on the economic impact of piracy in terms of job losses and economic growth.

Technology

Technology is available to help tackle illicit sharing before the loss of revenue becomes critical compared to content license rights. NAGRA has developed Active Streaming Protection, a framework providing a holistic approach to address security gaps open to pirates. Covering devices, applications, service platforms, and content delivery networks, end to end protection is assured.

We help by building your protection barriers to make life difficult for the pirates.

Start with secure playback & compliance, which supports all market-leading DRMs and NexGuard Forensic Watermarking to actively fight piracy, disrupting pirate services at their source.

Access Control & Service Protection can help ensure your service is accessed by legitimate users only and protects against cyber threats.

Intelligence is also a critical component to help focus your limited resources on the main hubs of the piracy problem. NAGRA Anti-Piracy Services can help with IP blocking with local ISPs to disrupt consumer access to pirate services. Still, more critically, components such as our Threat Intelligence service crawls the Internet 24/7, 365 days a year, gathering intelligence to fuel your investigative efforts and help prioritize anti-piracy resources towards the most impactful targets.

Enforcement

For broader efforts, or where piracy is already identified, NAGRA can provide the full support and analysis required for legal actions. If you don't have the in-house staff or your team already over-stretched, NAGRA offers Investigation Services to help drive enforcement action against crucial content and service piracy targets. Our lawyers, investigators, and technical experts deliver comprehensive, industry-leading investigation reports, including a proposed enforcement strategy. Collectively, we can implement the right solution to protect your content, rights, and revenues.

Reach out for a Security Assessment Today!

NAGRA helps operators protect their live sports content across the pay-TV and streaming industry to secure both services and revenues. This continual dialogue means we understand the markets challenges and are ready to help!

Contact us here to learn more, chat with one of our security experts, or request our security assessment service to identify any weaknesses in your current defenses; we'd love to continue the conversation.

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