Irdeto, the world leader in digital platform cybersecurity, has tracked a significant rise in key piracy drivers such as high broadband penetration, widespread access to digital devices, technological advancements, and cultural and economic factors, making the issue of online video piracy more pressing than ever.
As a result, Irdeto has strengthened its Online Piracy Detection (OPD), a content protection solution safeguarding online videos from unauthorized access and redistribution. By leveraging licensed data from IMDb, the world’s most popular and authoritative source for information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities, Irdeto can now provide content owners with a comprehensive overview of title consumption over the internet.
No longer limited to low-quality cam releases, piracy has grown into a full-fledged business by deploying cutting-edge technical methods to steal high-quality videos and redistribute them on the internet. This shift has significantly impacted content owners, studios and producers, particularly in light of the growing number of studios cutting back on the theatrical window in favor of digital distribution. The biggest challenge facing studios and content owners is the difficulty in identifying, tracking down and removing illegal copies in a timely manner.
The latest developments of Irdeto’s OPD solution allows content owners to obtain all the information about any title from hundreds of pirate sites, regardless of whether the titles fall under their purview. The collected data is then cleaned, catalogued, sorted and pulled into a dataset with all available titles from the sites Irdeto monitors around the world.
The monitoring coverage of pirate websites is expanded regularly in response to the growing popularity of each site or any specific regional content that may interest content owners. This collection process is repeated every day to build a history that shows when titles are released and how they are distributed over the internet.
A score demonstrating pirate consumption is also computed depending on several criteria, providing studios and content owners with a useful indication of how popular each title is on domestic and international pirate sites.
Irdeto leverages data points from IMDb to extract unique insights and augment deeper study on title trends and popularity. For example, IMDb meters are derived from the page-views and interactions from the IMDb audience of 250 million monthly visitors, providing a unique view of global title and celebrity relevancy and popularity. In addition, the IMDb rating is a daily-computed average of more than 1 billion 1-10 ratings from engaged fans all over the world.
Leveraging the comprehensive global catalog and vast amount of data types licensed by IMDb including unique title IDs, cast and crew listings, posters, plots, release dates, genres and keywords, provides an authoritative source of truth for current, upcoming and catalog releases.
These unique IMDb insights and identifying data points, combined with Irdeto’s piracy score for each title, offer studios and content owners a comprehensive and accurate view of the popularity of a title, no matter whether the consumption is from a legitimate provider or a pirate service. Through Irdeto’s OPD Solution, all of this information is easily searched for and accessed in seconds.
Irdeto utilizes a comprehensive suite of products from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enhance its anti-piracy services. IMDb data, which is available to license through AWS Data Exchange, plays a crucial role in data enrichment, allowing for increased operational efficiency. AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provide scalable, serverless computing and reliable storage, ensuring swift responses to threats. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) delivers the computing power needed for demanding tasks, while Amazon Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) and Amazon Redshift support Irdeto teams in identifying emerging trends in piracy and other security threats. This AWS suite of services bundled with Irdeto expertise and experience, provides the next-gen solution to piracy.
Not only does this innovation provide a comprehensive view of how a title is consumed on the internet, but it is also strategically useful for studios and content owners in adapting their distribution models and anti-piracy actions globally and in specific regions. Benefits include:
Tailor distribution strategies for different markets: Tracking viewer preferences, such as genre, content type or actors, allows content producers and distributors to discover which type of movie is more popular in which region and tailor their offerings accordingly.
Examine the success of the go-to-market strategy: Analyzing when piracy spikes occur (shortly after a release or during a specific season) can help gauge the urgency of demand and the effectiveness of release strategies. Instantaneous post-release piracy of content may indicate the strong, immediate interest of the public in that title. This will also benefit the studios in finding the right direction for similar products in the future.
Capture market tastes and trends through user engagement: Metrics such as the number of downloads, stream counts and the longevity of pirated content actively shared can be indicative of how engaging or rewatchable the content is perceived to be.
Get to know pirate services: Comparing piracy data with legal consumption figures helps content owners and legitimate service providers understand the gap between legal and illegal viewership. Disparities may suggest pricing issues, availability or other barriers to legal consumption.
Understand what viewers need: Feedback and reviews on piracy platforms provide qualitative insights into what viewers like or dislike about the content or the legitimate platform where the content is released. This is crucial in driving strategic changes in release and marketing plans that better cater to the target customers.
Pirates are evolving, and so are we! Using data licensed by IMDb, Irdeto aims to create a massive intelligence network with access to all information on copyright infringement in video content, enabling prompt and efficient enforcement measures.
Keep fortifying our weapon to fight piracy – that’s the ultimate goal of our partnership!
Would you like additional information about our OPD solution and end-to-end anti-piracy program? Visit Irdeto at Stand 1.D51 at IBC 2024, on September 13–16, to experience the demo of this new feature and discuss your business needs. Or reach out to us here to start the conversation.