Casual Streaming Piracy and the Cost of Chasing it
At 纽约流媒体, held in Manhattan the week of May 20, I had the opportunity to moderate a 面板 周围 流安全. 这可能是 这都是第五次或第六次了 在过去十年中, but an interesting dichotomy popped up during the prep meeting with 面板ists, and again while we were on stage during the live session.
The concept was “casual piracy” and how it differed from “professional piracy” in both intent and scale.
我不打算重述整个小组, but I do want to add some additional thoughts to what we discussed on the 面板.
- 休闲盗版是一个问题，但只是一个小问题. 我或许可以这样补充一下: Password sharing isn’t (or probably shouldn’t be) the primary focus for content platforms. 很多新闻周期都在讨论如何 打击密码共享 本来不是什么大事，后来才成为大事. It wasn’t a thing because it allowed the industry to grow to a level of viewership that challenged, then ultimately undermined traditional linear cable content delivery paradigms.
当镇压发生时, in rapid succession across various well-known OTT platforms, it also proved that the vast majority of consumers would pay for the service if they had to (and by “had to” I mean that, when the OTT providers changed the rules of the game, the consumer did the honorable thing in order to continue to consume the OTT platform’s product).
That the crackdowns will sustain growth for a period of time is a given, even in the face of price hikes (which also happened nearly in lockstep with the crackdowns), but it will also be interesting to see how subscriber growth rates fall off when particular series end. It may just be that those extended friends and 家庭成员 that used a friend or family member’s password opted to keep their viewing of particular programs alive for the time being but have little intent to maintain an additional subscription fee over the next year or so.
- 专业的盗版 薪水高吗. On the 面板 we had representation from four parts of Europe, each with a unique perspective on the means and methods that professional pirates will go to in order to make crime pay.
我们讨论过的一个例子, 从去年世界杯期间开始, was the fact that pirates have become sophisticated—and brazen—enough to consider leaching streams and then attacking the primary broadcast streams in hopes of pushing more viewers to the pirates’ offerings of the same streams. 攻击的一种形式是通过使用 分布式拒绝服务(DDoS), wherein pirates hit legitimate servers with thousands or hundreds of thousands of fake requests for content, rendering the attacked server incapable of serving up both legitimate and fake requests for content.
Another anecdote concerned scenarios in which multiple pirate entities band together to pare out watermarking methodologies that involve sending sporadic watermarks. A half-dozen pirate entities might look at an equal number of on-demand content streams, determine which parts are watermarked (assuming that the watermark occurs at different times for different streams), 然后拼接一个没有水印的版本.
The point of both of these anecdotes is that neither involves a group of neighbors, 家庭成员, 甚至脚本kiddy, 团结起来对抗体制. This is innovation in piracy on a scale that works only if the pirated streams are profitable for the pirates to counter-host alongside the legitimate streams.
I’ll have more thoughts on this topic in a future column, but for now I encourage you to go watch the 面板 video and contemplate if we as an industry as spending too much time chasing casual piracy at the expense of truly engaging with the leaching and financial loss that come from professional piracy.
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