M+E Daily

During a virtual, pre-IBC press conference on Sept. 2, Synamedia executives touted details of the video software provider’s new VN Cloud managed service for its entire video network portfolio and a new “intelligence-first” anti-piracy security solution.

Synamedia VN Cloud combines broadcast quality of service with the latest cloud technologies to provide the flexibility and scale broadcasters and video service providers expect now, the company said.

The new, “full-fledged managed service… will enable us to talk to our 1,000 customers that are already delivering, distributing, processing  and driving content to over 100 million users today,” and enable them “to really benefit from the flexibility of the cloud,” Julien Signès, SVP and GM of Video Network at Synamedia, told reporters.

VN Cloud offers “end-to-end video network functionality on any public, private or hybrid cloud, and breaks new ground by delivering the high availability customers demand on a single platform for both broadcast” and over-the-top (OTT) services, Synamedia said in a news release Sept. 3.

VN Cloud will provide operations teams the “insight, agility and flexibility to effortlessly deploy and manage multiple workflows and deliver outstanding quality of experience on any device, anywhere, with seamless failover, while controlling costs,” according to the company.

The new service also “lowers the barriers to launching new services by allowing service providers, content owners and broadcasters to quickly test new services anywhere in the world, with support for lab-in-the-cloud, pop-up and disaster recovery events,” Synamedia said.

The VN Cloud Portal, meanwhile, “brings full automation to the launch, scale up and scale down of channels with elastic resourcing,” it noted. Customers can launch new channels in mere minutes instead of months, “accelerating the time to revenues, while enjoying a whole new level of cost control with self-provisioning through the VN Cloud Workflow Portal,” it said, adding: “Customers can deploy an OTT service in the cloud using a pay-as-you-use cloud model then, once established, move it on-premise. The Workflow Portal’s dashboards provide transparency about costs for hybrid, on-premise and public cloud,” and also controls the cost of public cloud to support disaster recovery.

Dashboards provide users with visual representations of each end-to-end media processing workflow, “flagging up any problems and changing channel line-ups easily in near real-time using drag and drop,” the company said.

“As we designed VN Cloud, we focused on providing total control of complex, hybrid workflows from scene to screen while managing costs and with the insurance policy of cloud-based disaster recovery,” Signès said in the news release.

VN Cloud combines all the elements of a video network workflow in a cloud-native format using microservices, Synamedia said. Its containerised video processing stack means that each function, including encoding, is fully isolated and managed on a per-channel basis, it noted. Workflow support includes: the PowerVu portfolio for secure content distribution, low latency Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR), broadcast, Connect inter-cloud connection and ATSC 3.0.

The company’s Infinite cloud TV platform, meanwhile, is “evolving to be even more responsive and gaining great momentum,” Synamedia CEO Yves Padrines told reporters Sept. 2. On that front, UAE operator Etisalat recently launched SwitchTV, a new direct-to-consumer (D2C) service based on Infinite, he noted.

On Aug. 12, Synamedia launched Iris, he also said, calling it “our next-generation solution to create addressable advertising opportunities for pay-TV, but also broadcasters and OTT” providers. The new advertising solution was designed for those service providers, as well as hybrid service providers, to “unlock new revenue streams,” Synamedia said when announcing Iris.

The Ongoing Piracy Challenge

The company is, meanwhile, seeing an “exponential growth in piracy” globally, he pointed out. Synamedia customers “know that they can’t capture greater value for broadening content production and wider distribution if they don’t protect themselves from streaming piracy,” Padrines told reporters, adding: “The penny has finally dropped, not only for pay-TV players, but now also for OTT players [and] also sports rights owners. They all realise security and protection against piracy and streaming piracy, in particular, are not nice to have, but must have,” he said.

The security enhancements that Synamedia is announcing now all have “one common theme: They are all built and driven by intelligence,” Yael Fainaro,  SVP, Security at the company, told reporters. “In the current piracy environment, having strong technology solutions augmented by intelligence is not enough,” she said.

The picture that is being provided of piracy in the sector today is “looking quite grim for content owners and video service providers,” she noted, adding: “In Europe on its own, we are seeing more than 20 million active subscribers to illicit, pirate sites, with growth of more than 25 percent over the last 12 to 15 months. These are people that are paying on a monthly [basis] or pre-pay to watch pirated content and could be potentially subscribers to legitimate services.”

One major challenge the industry faces is that the “barrier to entry today for becoming a pirate is extremely low” – and so is the risk level for them, she told reporters, adding: “The pirates are highly sophisticated – both [the] business and technology, and they are well-organised. Pirates are also using legitimate services like cloud and hosting” Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and they are “basically hiding behind them when doing their illegal activities so that finding them and acting against them becomes very challenging,” she said.

Pirates also don’t have to worry themselves with observing the rules like legitimate businesses do, she noted.

A “different approach” to solve the problem, therefore, was needed and “there is no one silver bullet that solves it, so the solution needs to evolve together with the pirates’ methods,” she said, adding: “The solution cannot focus only on locking down the content or the service or on identifying the content in the pirate domain, but to be able to act and make a difference on the pirate” return on investment (ROI): “Reduce revenues, increase cost and/or increase the risk.”

Synamedia’s new intelligence-first security model is a “holistic anti-piracy solution that includes as the basic – and the first layer – the best-in-class security solution, the highest and most robust wall you can find to prevent as much as possible pirates from offering legitimate access to our customers’ service and from content leaking,” she said, adding: “If we don’t put as high and robust enough” of a wall up, “the problem will become impossible to fight.”

The new solution is “laser-focused on eradicating streaming pirates’ businesses and protecting legitimate providers’ revenues,” the company said in a press release.

The new approach combines digital and human intelligence to “zero in on the increasingly sophisticated streaming piracy underworld that is threatening the media industry,” the company said. Its new solution “provides unparalleled forensic insights into the minds, motivations and behaviours of pirates, and their infrastructure and business models, for a more powerful, targeted anti-piracy response,” it noted.

The new solution is “already fuelling technology innovations across Synamedia’s security portfolio, helping customers protect revenues, negotiate fair content license terms such as sports rights, and ensure compliance,” it said.

Several new product enhancements are already benefiting from this methodology and include:

• A redesigned counter-piracy operations centre – Synamedia EverGuard – that the company called the “beating heart” of its intelligence and analysis platform and Streaming Piracy Disruption (SPD) managed service. Synamedia EverGuard incorporates big data analytics and creates a list of recommended actions against a set of devices, user accounts and pirate streaming sites. It “supports multiple ways of disrupting services and analyses the effectiveness of each disruption mechanism for better future outcomes,” the company said, adding: “The choice of action and time of enforcement is designed to cause maximum impact to pirates and nudge viewers back to legitimate services.”
• A new user interface for the SPD service, allowing operational security personnel to fine-tune the counter-piracy operations centre recommendations if required to meet specific business needs.
• A new generation of intelligence agents including new client- and/or headend-based watermarking agents that Synamedia said are resistant to pirates’ evasion techniques, and a new analytics agent.
• New disruption agents for a wider choice of responses, including new quarantining agents in the CDN and the control plane, along with device revocation agents for turning off and de-registering devices proven to have been used by pirates.
• CSFEye, a credentials sharing and fraud solution that the company said is an extension to the Credentials Sharing Insight service. CSFEye “specifically targets fraudsters engaged in stealing or abusing accounts for commercial purposes, who compromise the privacy and identity of legitimate subscribers and pose a legal and commercial risk to service providers,” Synamedia said. CSFEye includes the ability to identify all shadow users (sharers and fraudsters), recommend and execute a variety of actions to mitigate the risk and convert them into paying customers.

“With a blend of human and digital intelligence we can build a detailed picture of the pirate ecosystem, crack the criminal mind-set and – working closely with law enforcement agencies – ultimately shut down pirates’ businesses,” Fainaro said in the press release.

“This hard data is an industry gamechanger, making it possible to move away from a best-effort cost model to one that proves the efficacy and ROI of any anti-piracy spend,” she added.