On December 8, the Media and Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA)’s Content Delivery Security Association (CDSA) held its annual Content Protection Summit. In one of the sessions, titled “Anti-Piracy Now and Later,” panelists noted the impact that the double strike of COVID-19 and recent changes to theatrical release windows have had on piracy.
The number of minutes of watermarked content increased by 71% compared with 2019, while credential sharing among streaming subscribers increased by 150 percent; according to SHIFT, provider of secure production and workflow platform. In 2020, legal license delivery increased by more than 60%, and demand for DRM services by video providers more than doubled, according to an executive from EZDRM.
According to data collected by Muso, an anti-piracy technology supplier, illegal (piracy) site visits peaked in April and declined through the course of the year. Muso measured nearly 15 billion pirate video requests from January through October, 2020; with an average of 4.4 video visits per Internet user. The top five movie viewing countries were India, the US Turkey, China and Brazil. The number of TV piracy visits was about 54 billion, with an average of about 16 visits per Internet user. Top five TV viewing countries were measured to be the US, Russian Federation, China, Brazil and Ukraine.
The panelists were:
- Andy Chatterley, Chief Executive Officer, MUSO
- Olga Kornienko, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer , EZDRM
- Eric Wynalek, Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, SHIFT
Read the entire article via MESA
Watch a video of this panel session
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Why it matters
In the view of Piracy Monitor, individual technologies such as those represented by this session’s panelists are good as far as they go. But fighting piracy overall requires a much broader and deeper view of the problem than fighting it in production or through DRM or watermarking. Technology solutions also include cybersecurity, as well as guidelines and best practices provided by neutral industry-level advocates like MovieLabs.
This session underscored that the public health and media industry disruptions of 2020 unquestionably have had a direct impact on the rate of piracy.
