Industry journal decodeTV surveyed more than 60 senior video business insiders from 17 countries, spanning content service providers, telcos, technology providers and others, to illuminate how the industry perceives the threats and how it needs to be addressed. Piracy Monitor was one of those interviewed.
The nine threat categories had to do with consumer-facing distribution matters, including credential fraud, pirate re-streaming, ad fraud and CDN leaks. Awareness and adoption of software protection was not measured. Measurements and attitudes of the respondents are very informative.
The survey found that the attraction of pirate sites outweighs their perception of threat. The biggest attraction of pirate services was measured to be the convenience of finding all of the content that they want in one place (73%) and the belief that using pirate services is “consequence-free” (41%).
About 20% of respondents characterized piracy as an “Existential” threat, and an additional 31% said it was “Big but not existential.” They felt that the “very important” threats were commercialized re-streaming (56%) and organized credential theft (51.6% – as opposed to casual password sharing which came in at 20%). Nearly a third of respondents considered Ad blocking and substitution to be “not very important.”
The most commonly-used security techniques were DRM and service geo-blocking (both at 65.6%). On the other end of the spectrum, about 6% use blockchain-supported encryption, which about half characterized as either being too expensive or not useful.
Respondents said that the biggest barriers to distribution of live events via all-streaming delivery are the technical difficulty and consumer inertia (preference for over-the-air and pay-TV distribution rather than streaming).
Awareness of the standard published by C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) was relatively high (about 2/3 of respondents), but almost half of those who were aware of it thought that it would be of limited value.
The research was sponsored by FriendMTS and EZDRM, which are industry suppliers of anti-piracy technologies
Why it matters
Content piracy and its attendant threat to the revenue security of legitimate rightsholders and content service providers (CSPs) has a history as long as that of the premium services targeted by the pirates. But the advent of live-streaming has introduced new vulnerabilities and challenges.
Further reading
Will Piracy Kill Video? (Landing page). Research report. March 2026. decodeTV
