This post links to an interview of Terri Davies, President of The Trusted Partner Network (TPN), by Sunny Bunch, reporter for The Bulwark.
TPN is an initiative of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the MPA’s Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). TPN’s purpose is to provide benchmarks for minimum security preparedeness and to evaluate the security capabilities of its vendors. TPN also provides security, content protection and other services help members minimize risks of content theft, security breaches and hacks prior to release.
Ms Davies has a background in post production, and worked at Sony Pictures between 2000 and 2015, spanning most of the period during which the studios transitioned from physical media to online distribution, and experiencing a wide range of attempts, failures and successes in protecting it along the way.
The following is an excerpt:
(Terri Davies) “Basically, (the motion picture industry has) a community of, I don’t know … three thousand plus (vendors) who provide services to the studios to create and distribute content. Visual effects, houses, audio post production, localization, you name it. Any type of service is needed to create or distribute content, and every one of them has to be as secure as they possibly can be.
“So … MPA were doing their assessments, but increasingly these studios were doing their own assessments as well. And … these vendors were finding themselves being audited by up to eight, nine, ten different studios, in a single year.
“…The studios realized that they (were) not really competing on security … to keep all content safe. (This led to) the idea of TPN: What if we did one audit? What if we leverage the MPA best practices, and we built a assessment on top of that, and we drove all of the vendors to TPN, to do a TPN assessment that would then be held in a central location, and all of the studios could leverage that. Right? We would introduce massive efficiency to the industry,” said Ms. Davies.
Read or listen to the full interview
Stopping Piracy Before It Starts. (Part of the series: The Bulwark Goes To Hollywood). Podcast and transcript. By Sonny Bunch. November 11, 2023. The Bulwark
Why it matters
The media & entertainment industry has had an enormous challenge in protecting its valuable programming in the face of the massive transition from physical media to virtualization. As this transition takes place, TPN has helped normalize the security requirements and make vetting more efficient
