M+E Connections

M&E Journal: Protecting Live Sports – Timing is Everything

A recent Forbes article noted that the WTO, World Bank, and IMF have each revised economic growth expectations for the year.

The economic environment is top of mind for consumers and major businesses around the globe, so it comes as no surprise that everyone is adapting accordingly.

Luckily, for a sports fanatic like me, the most wonderful time of the year is here and brings welcomed distractions.

With the NBA and NHL seasons, college and professional football, World Cup football (yes! Costa Rica is in the field) — the choices are limited only to the amount of time I’ll be able to dedicate to the couch.

With live sports playing an integral role in the day-to-day lives of people around the world, the business of sports cannot be ignored.

From consumer behaviors and education to the challenges and solutions presented in live sports piracy, there is much to consider for a winning strategy.

CONSUMER IMPACT AND AWARENESS

Given the economy and inflation, the reality is that consumer resources aren’t endless.

The number of streaming video services available to consumers continues to rise. A March 2022 Kagan Consumer Insights survey revealed that U.S. internet households now use an average of 6.8 streaming video services.

At some point, even the most rabid fan base will have to make decisions on their subscription and live event expenses.

Compounding economic circumstances is the issue of consumer confusion. With league rights expanding to multiple content providers, it’s becoming a pain for consumers to keep track of where each event is airing.

It shouldn’t be this difficult to follow your favorite team, but unfortunately, that’s become an event itself these days.

And the harder it is for consumers to figure out where the big event is airing, the more likely they are to utilize search engines to find it.

This opens the door to illicit services that often look genuine to consumers. Enticing consumers means they quickly adapt their consumption behavior, thus creating a perfect storm of business issues for content owners and distributors.

And ultimately, when faced with a well-branded pirate service, who wouldn’t take up a deal offering every live sporting event for an attractive price?

It’s incumbent on our industry to make finding and accessing live sports content easier. We also need to educate consumers on the economic impact of piracy in terms of job losses and economic growth.

PROTECTING LIVE SPORTS IS DIFFERENT

Why do we love sports? Because the live action is unpredictable and immediate.

These same qualities are what make protecting live sports difficult. As highlighted during a CDSA Content Protection Summit featuring NAGRA, live sports have a time-criticality component when it comes to protection.

The key is to do something to stop piracy during the live window of the content; otherwise, all the value is gone.

Sending a takedown notice after the event is over is a flawed process.

You won’t see the piracy 4-5 days after the fact, as it only happened for the 90-minute live event window. Immediate action is a necessity.

TECHNOLOGY CAN BE YOUR MVP

Technology is available to help tackle illicit sharing before the loss of revenue becomes critical compared to content license rights.

For example, NAGRA has developed Active Streaming Protection, a framework providing a holistic approach to address security gaps open to pirates. End-to-end protection is assured by covering devices, applications, service platforms and content delivery networks.

Consider building your protection barriers to make life difficult for the pirates.

* Actively fight piracy, disrupting pirate services at their source with secure playback and compliance, which supports all market-leading DRMs and NexGuard Forensic Watermarking.

* Ensure your service is accessed by legitimate users only and protects against cyber threats with Access Control and Service Protection.

* Utilize intelligence as a critical component to help focus your limited resources on the main hubs of the piracy problem. Services such as NAGRA Anti-Piracy can help with IP blocking with local ISPs to disrupt consumer access to pirate services.

Still, more critically, components such as our Threat Intelligence service crawls the Internet 24/7, 365 days a year, gathering intelligence to fuel your investigative efforts and help prioritize anti-piracy resources towards the most impactful targets.

DRIVE ENFORCEMENT

For broader efforts, or where piracy is already identified, NAGRA can provide the full support and analysis required for legal action.

If you don’t have the in-house staff or your team is already over-stretched, NAGRA offers Investigation Services to help drive enforcement action against crucial content and service piracy targets.

Our lawyers, investigators and technical experts deliver comprehensive, industry-leading investigation reports based on more than 25 years of collective experience, including a proposed enforcement strategy.

Collectively, we can implement the right solution to protect your content, rights, and revenues.

Our mission is to help operators protect live sports content across the pay TV and streaming industry to secure services and revenues.

This continual dialogue means we understand the market’s challenges and are ready to help.

* By Rafael Rivera, Solutions Marketing Manager, NAGRA *

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