The recent crackdown led by the U.S. Department of Justice targeting several large-scale piracy websites should be seen as both a win and a warning for the media and entertainment industry.

In a coordinated international operation, authorities seized domains tied to some of the most popular piracy platforms, including sites that attracted tens of millions of visits annually and enabled widespread distribution of unauthorized movies, TV shows, and other digital content. These platforms hosted thousands of infringing works and facilitated millions of illegal downloads, generating significant revenue in the process.

On the surface, this looks like progress. And it is. But it also highlights a deeper issue that the industry can no longer ignore. By the time enforcement actions like this take place, piracy has already scaled, monetized, and caused substantial damage.

The Reality Behind Modern Piracy Operations

What the recent takedown reinforces is just how advanced piracy ecosystems have become. These were not small, niche operations. They were highly trafficked platforms, in some cases ranking among the most visited websites in their regions.

This reflects a broader shift. Piracy is no longer a fragmented activity driven by individuals. It has evolved into a structured, scalable business model. Today’s illegal platforms are often built using cloud infrastructure, automated ingestion tools, and sophisticated distribution pipelines. In many cases, they offer user experiences that closely resemble legitimate streaming services. For consumers, the line between legal and illegal access has never been more blurred.

This is why the concept of “piracy-as-a-service” is no longer an exaggeration. Entire ecosystems now exist to support the rapid deployment and monetization of stolen content.

Enforcement Alone Can’t Keep Up

The DOJ-led seizure demonstrates that coordinated enforcement can be effective. But it also illustrates a fundamental limitation. Enforcement is, by definition, reactive. Authorities step in after platforms have already gained traction, attracted millions of users, and distributed vast amounts of content. Even when domains are seized and infrastructure is dismantled, the underlying networks and expertise often remain intact. New platforms can and do emerge, sometimes within days.

We see this pattern repeatedly. A major operation shuts down one set of sites, only for others to take their place. It is an ongoing cycle that mirrors a game of whack-a-mole, but at global scale. For broadcasters and streaming providers, this creates a critical gap. By the time action is taken, the most valuable window for protecting content has already passed.

The Live Content Problem and Expanding Attack Surface

Nowhere is this more evident than with live programming. Sports, news, and special events derive the majority of their value in real time. If a live stream is captured and redistributed during the broadcast window, even a swift takedown may come too late. The audience has already migrated, and the revenue opportunity is lost. This is why relying solely on enforcement is increasingly risky. It does not align with how quickly piracy operates today.

Another factor complicating the challenge is the rapid expansion of the content delivery ecosystem. Streaming services now reach audiences across a wide range of unmanaged devices, including smart TVs, mobile apps, browsers, and connected set-top boxes. Each of these endpoints represents a potential entry point for piracy.

If protections at the device or session level are insufficient, streams can be captured and redistributed with minimal effort. In parallel, techniques such as CDN leeching allow bad actors to exploit legitimate delivery infrastructure to scale their operations further. The result is a vastly larger and more complex attack surface than the industry has faced in the past.

Why Proactive Defense Is No Longer Optional

The lesson from the recent DOJ action is not just that piracy is widespread. It is that the industry is still largely responding after the fact. To change that, the focus must shift toward prevention.

A proactive anti-piracy strategy starts with visibility. Operators need to understand how their content is being accessed, where it is flowing, and how it behaves across networks and devices. Abnormal patterns, such as unusual concurrency levels or unexpected geographic distribution, can provide early indicators of illicit activity.

From there, the goal is to reduce the opportunity for piracy to occur in the first place. This includes strengthening device authentication, limiting credential abuse, and deploying forensic watermarking to trace leaks back to their source. Real-time monitoring and automated response mechanisms are equally important, enabling operators to act immediately rather than in hours.

Perhaps most importantly, anti-piracy systems must be adaptable. Pirates are constantly evolving their methods, often iterating on new techniques within hours. Defensive strategies must be just as dynamic.

The recent enforcement serves as a snapshot of an ongoing battle. It also serves as a reminder that the industry cannot rely on enforcement alone to solve the problem. Legal action will always play a critical role, but it is only one part of the equation.

For broadcasters, streaming providers, and content owners, the path forward requires a true shift in mindset. Instead of asking how quickly pirated content can be taken down, the more important question is how to prevent it from appearing at all. That shift from reactive to proactive is a strategic necessity. Because in today’s piracy landscape, being even a few steps behind is no longer sustainable.

Learn more at www.verimatrix.com.

The media and entertainment business is built on what it offers its viewers: programming, sports, news and other live events. While language purists may balk at the current use of the word “assets” instead of “programs,” it does convey the value of the material—both creative and commercial—shown on TV channels and streaming services. They are valuable commodities and have always needed to be protected. Unfortunately, the move to file-based production, with everything on computer servers and network or cloud access, has left assets—and their owners—extremely vulnerable.

This was starkly illustrated by the 2014 hack of files and data from Sony Pictures, which included staff details, emails, corporate information and copies of at-the-time unreleased films. Calls for heightened security in the aftermath of the breach ultimately led to the creation in 2018 of the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA), with the MPA taking full control of TPN in 2021.

Early Moves
The MPA issued its first best practice guidelines for content security in 2009, in collaboration with member companies and consultancy Deloitte. Updates and revisions followed between 2011 and 2018, with authorship moving exclusively to the MPA and its membership.

Deloitte published its own report on the subject in 2018, highlighting the digital transformation of content in all its forms. Among its recommendations for securing material were digital fingerprinting, encryption, blockchain (a digital ledger for recording transactions and events), watermarking and plugging the “analog hole,” where programs are copied from legacy sources.

John Footen, managing director of Deloitte Consulting, acknowledges that the situation continues to evolve but says new technologies are now being used with established practices to further tighten security.

“Automation can reduce the effort to maintain a consistent security posture in large-scale systems and to recover after an attack,” he explains. “We’re also seeing greater integration of media technology with enterprise security systems. More products can work with single sign-on in zero-trust environments, for example. At Deloitte, we’re applying AI for cyber defense, not only for well-established uses such as detecting anomalous behavior and interdicting threats but also for assessment and visualization.”

The changing nature of the threat— hackers developing new viruses and ways of infiltrating systems—calls for content owners to be ever vigilant. This is reflected in the MPA/TPN Best Practice Guidelines, which have been updated on an annual basis (sometimes twice in a year) since 2018. The most recent revision appeared in August this year, with new guidance on working from home and remote access to data centers, plus minor updates to cloud specific controls.

The recommendations from Crystal Pham, vice president of operations and product management for TPN are fairly universal no matter the process: Ensuring that content owners and facilities have secure connections— including not logging into applications from unsecured networks; keeping applications updated and patched; using strong passwords and authentication mechanisms; not sharing accounts or credentials; always installing applications from trusted sources; and adhering to MPA Best Practices, as well as completing an annual TPN assessment.

Pham characterizes the security issue in M&E as “always evolving” and can be influenced by new technologies, the shortening of  release windows and emerging threats. 

“Change is a constant,” she says. “I do think there’s more awareness about security, with better understanding of the constant change and the need to get ahead of it when possible. I believe it’s becoming more embedded in the process of creating, distributing and consuming content. It’s also becoming more ingrained in our culture.”

New Methods Needed
The ever-shifting landscape is summed up by Asaf Ashkenazi, chief executive of Verimatrix, who observes that as technology advances, so do the techniques used by pirates to illegally obtain, distribute and monetize content.

“DRM and other traditional security methods are no longer as effective against today’s savvy hackers,” he says. “New real-time detection and prevention systems that are layered on traditional protection methods are needed to combat modern piracy efforts—especially those that leverage AI/ML and cloud infrastructure to exploit at scale.”

To counter such threats, Verimatrix has developed Streamkeeper, which combines multi-DRM, forensic watermarking and “Counterspy,” which Ashkenazi describes as a “motion sensor” or “alarm” that detects piracy as it happens. “The goal, however, should not be to completely eliminate piracy but to disrupt the pirates’ business models,” he comments. “By increasing costs beyond potential profits, the motivation for piracy diminishes. Real-time detection, prevention and rapid response are key.”

Among the ways of disrupting the activities of pirates is to track down purloined programming to the sites where it is being offered illegally and shut them down. Another company providing such monitoring enforcement services is Friend MTS, which does this using both fingerprinting and watermarking technologies. 

“A customer will give us a clean reference feed of their playout and we fingerprint that,” explains Nik Forman, vice president of marketing for the U.K.-based company. “This allows us to uniquely identify that clip of video. If the monitoring systems— which are all automated and crawling the web—then find a suspicious web site is playing that content, we fingerprint it so we can compare them. 

“If they match, we know it is an illicit player and the client can send an enforcement notice or a takedown order,” Forman continues. “If they also take our watermarking services, the content is marked invisibly and basically sits like a QR code in the actual video. When we find the illicit content and we identify it, we match it with a fingerprint and can then say it is one of our watermarks and we extract that payload of subscriber information.”

‘Never Trust, Always Verify’
While the Sony hack made the M&E sector painfully aware of its vulnerabilities, the threats have only increased since then due to otherwise innocent technological developments. The threat landscape has evolved with emergent technologies such as the Internet of Things, 5G connectivity and advanced generative AI capabilities, according to Eric Elbaz, principal strategic engagement manager at Akamai.

“We’ve also seen state-sponsored attacks become more brazen,” he said. “Nation-state actors are believed to be behind some of the most sophisticated and persistent threats seen to date.”

This was the suspicion surrounding the attack on the supply chain of software company SolarWinds in 2020, while, as Elbaz points out, ransomware attacks have increased “dramatically.”

A recent example of this is the breach of MGM Resorts’ systems in Las Vegas, which reportedly cost the company approximately $100 million. But Elbaz does see progress in dealing with the threats: “On the defensive side, we’ve seen major strides being made across threat intelligence, a paradigm shift from ‘trust but verify’ to ‘never trust always verify’ architectures, which is zero-trust security. Deeper public-private sector collaboration and information sharing, as well as a catch up in privacy laws, regulations, and standards are also helping.”

The threat shows no signs of going away and future attacks are likely to be even more cunning and sophisticated. According to “Variety,” in 2022, hacking of popular entertainment content rose 18% YOY compared with 2021, with the U.S. having the largest share of film and TV demand (i.e., illicit streams, downloads and the like), with more than 13.5 billion visits to piracy sites.

But the tools to combat it are there and, when it comes down to it, the greatest weapons are probably vigilance and common sense. 

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France and SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Verimatrix today launched Verimatrix Streamkeeper, a cybersecurity and anti-piracy solution for the media and entertainment industry.

Streamkeeper enables users to hunt down and take out OTT pirates who steal content, such as live sports and premium movies, as they are distributed from the source to the endpoint (mobile app/user level), the company said.

The solution includes Verimatrix Counterspy technology, a new, autonomous anti-piracy and app protection security agent relying on the company’s proprietary zero code technology. It enables users to add deep, defensive countermeasures as well as monitor clients without a huge integration effort. Integration can be done in minutes, it said.

Streamkeeper enables operators to offer studios and other content owners piracy visibility and protection. It also gives operators full control of the visibility given to content owners, the company said.

Creative hackers often weaponize CDNs and end device software, such as mobile apps and web browsers, and use them against operators. Verimatrix’s Counterspy zero-code injection approach shines a light on previously hidden piracy attacks, leaving pirates with no place to hide. The battle-ready tools provided within Streamkeeper allow customer to fight piracy with powerful, military-grade cybersecurity countermeasures never before available, it said.

Currently in beta testing and examined by studios, Verimatrix Streamkeeper is scheduled for general availability at the end of Q1 2022, the company said.

“Streamkeeper is a game-changing new OTT anti-piracy solution that will forever change how Hollywood and sports will tackle piracy,” said Asaf Ashkenazi, chief operating officer and president at Verimatrix. 

“It’s a complete content security package containing exciting new technologies, such as the autonomous injection of an anti-piracy security agent that utilizes zero code technology; meaning we can now easily add deep, defensive anti-piracy tracing, app protection and countermeasures instantly to customer ecosystems.”

Working in tandem with multi-DRM, fingerprinting/watermarking and dark web crawling to track down pirated content in new ways, Streamkeeper takes anti-piracy far beyond reveal and takedown notices, enabling alert verification as well as views into the actual apps, devices and users accessing authorized and unauthorized content during livestreams, the company said.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

SAN DIEGO–Verimatrix, a specialist in securing and enhancing revenue for network-connected devices and services, has acquired the Akamai Identity Services IP from streaming giant Akamai. The acquisition adds TV Everywhere authentication service capabilities to Verimatrix’s security portfolio.

“This acquisition fits perfectly with our roadmap to streamline content workflows via cloud-based technologies to connect global consumers with great content,” said Mike Kleiman, COO, Verimatrix. “We are able to extend the value of these global identity services under our solution umbrella and provide a more flexible, yet standards-based alternative that will improve the experience for consumers and open new markets for content providers and programmers.”

TV Everywhere allows pay-TV subscribers to authenticate their ability to stream subscription content on multiple devices. 

AIS provides a common framework for implementing and scaling TVE services for multichannel video operators. Verimatrix says it will offer the enhanced and rebranded authentication services as an integrated component of the Verimatrix Content Authority System (VCAS) and Viewthority, the newly launched connected content distribution platform, as well as a standalone solution in order to best match content providers’ needs.

“As a long-standing partner, we know that Verimatrix will be able to enrich the AIS core technology and help content providers take TV Everywhere to the next level,” said Campbell Foster, Vice President of Media Industry and Product Marketing, Akamai. “This is a natural extension to Verimatrix’s value proposition of securing and enhancing revenue by supporting new ways to monetize content.” 

SAN DIEGO—Verimatrix, which aims to boost network-connected devices and services, has a new partner for cloud-based video delivery, announcing an API integration between its MultiRights OTT multi-DRM security system and Amazon Web Services Media Services. The specific AWS products for this integration are the AWS Elemental MediaConvert and AWS Elemental MediaPackage.

The cloud-based AWS Media Services can ingest, process, package and deliver video content with pay-as-you-go pricing. With this new integration, pay-TV operators, broadcasters and OTT providers can process and deliver video streams for broadcast television and multi-screen devices with the same capabilities as cloud-based solutions.

Using MultiRights OTT, operators can deploy multi-network services with a platform that will accommodate evolving security regimes and business models, while ensuring differentiated multi-screen video services across all device categories, per Verimatrix. The multi-DRM system brings set-top boxes, consumer devices and HTML5 browsers under a unified rights management security umbrella for secure content playback.

Live video workflows combine real-time encoding using AWS Elemental MediaLive and just-in-time packaging, origination and encryption using AWS Elemental MediaPackage with MultiRights OTT. AWS Elemental MediaConvert file-to-file video transcoding service works directly with MultiRights OTT, creating on-demand assets for broadcast and multi-screen delivery. MultiRights OTT can be used on-premises as a virtualized instance hosted in-house by the provider, or via the Verimatrix Secure Cloud hosting and management service. Additional features include optional video watermarking and real-time, cluod-based analytics.

CUPERTINO, CALIF.—Broadcasters, pay-TV and OTT service providers have a new resource to help with quality of service and quality of experience following an announcement that Interra Systems is partnering with Verimatrix. This team effort will see Interra’s Orion content monitoring suite integrate Verimatrix’s ViewRight Web security client platform with availability on cloud-based servers or local data centers and provide a way to monitor in-depth content quality.

The Orion content monitoring products allow for the delivery of video on devices through software-defined architecture, audio and video checks, and deployability on cloud-based infrastructures. There is also Orion-OTT, the software-based OTT system, which validates ABR streams along with QoE in real time for multiscreen service delivery over unmanaged networks.

The ViewRight system, meanwhile, provides a multiscreen and multi-DRM platform for content security and monetization. The system is based on the Verimatrix Video Content Authority System platform and services. It has a MultiRights OTT plus offering a provide a user experience with a secure media player and uniform interface across all devices.

The companies will display the technologies at their respective booths, 7.B13 for Interra and 5.A59 for Verimatrix.

AMSTERDAM—IBC 2017 will serve as the unveiling for Verimatrix’s new Service Cloud deployment option that provides video service operators with a framework for video content security and analytics. An alternative to on-premises systems, Secure Cloud is monitored by a Verimatrix Global Services team 24/7 and can be utilized by operators of Verspective MultiRights OTT Plus and Video Content Authority System.

Secure Cloud is implemented via a customer-dedicated Amazon Web Services virtual private cloud environment that includes private and secure storage for critical data and assets. Deploying VCAS and Verspective software in Secure Cloud make the video service components interoperable with other components of the cloud video ecosystem, including encoders and streamers, CDNs and content management systems.

Vertimatrix will showcase the Service Cloud at booth 5.A59 during IBC 2017, which runs from Sept. 15-19 in Amsterdam.