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 of whom characterized as either being too expensive or not useful.
Respondents said that the biggest barriers to distribution of live sporting events via all-streaming delivery are the technical difficulty and consumer inertia (preference for over-the-air and pay-TV distribution rather than streaming). The notion of consumer inertia seemed a bit dated from Piracy Monitor’s perspective, since the only barrier to consumers’ preference toward streaming (at least in the US) is the sports leagues’ insistance on distributing it via pay TV. Which creates scarcity. Which foments piracy.
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, and are both advocates of C2PA.
Why it matters
The decodeTV report is a consumer survey and not a category analysis and as such, it does not explicitly state or forecast the size of the piracy problem. The questionnaire was not designed to solicit any details about risks that fall outside of content delivery, such as data center or app-level cybersecurity, nor does it delve into how AI is used both as a weapon by pirates and as a solution to mitigate piracy.
That said, the report reminds us of how content piracy threatens the revenue security of legitimate rightsholders and content service providers (CSPs); and that piracy has a history as long as that of the premium services targeted by the pirates. The advent of live-streaming has introduced new vulnerabilities and challenges.
Further reading
Will Piracy Kill Video? (Landing page). Research report. March 2026. decodeTV
