M+E Connections

CPS@NAB: NAGRA Explores the Mind of a Pirate

Speaking April 17, during the session “Inside the Mind of a Pirate – Motivations, Methods, and Results” at the 2023 edition of CDSA’s Content Protection Summit at NAB (CPS@NAB), Ken Gerstein, VP of sales at NAGRA Anti-Piracy and NexGuard, helped attendees understand what makes a pirate tick.

To many consumers, illicit video services often appear to be genuine, and who wouldn’t jump to sign up for a deal offering premium content at a bargain price?

Gerstein shed light on what makes otherwise business-savvy individuals take on these illegal activities, even at the risk of getting caught, how piracy organizations get started, grow and flourish, and the motivations, objectives and methods of pirate activity.

“As everyone knows, the impact of piracy is quite significant,” Gerstein said at the start of the presentation.

“I just want to give you a few numbers to show how it’s grown,” he told attendees. “As we’ve aggregated some of our data and [data] from partners, we’re estimating about 230 million views per year attributed to piracy. And, in the U.S. alone, that’s equivalent to $81 billion in revenue that’s lost.”

He went on to say: “If we look at where piracy is right now, it’s shifted from a lot of set-top box piracy going back 10 years and now about 80 percent of piracy is coming from” over-the-top (OTT) streaming.

Meanwhile, a recent study showed that is “taking up 24 percent of the bandwidth,” he noted.

Therefore, he explained: “If we look at the problem, we have to really take an account and look at it in a different way.”

He pointed to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “Legend has it that he never lost a battle [or] a campaign,” according to Gerstein. “I don’t know whether that was true. Certainly we didn’t write about any of his losses. But there’s actually something interesting. He always stressed looking at the enemy. And for us in the content protection/anti-piracy world, it’s really those pirates and pirate organizations that are threatening our business.”

NAGRA “decided to look at our networks and find some pirates that we could speak to, try to understand their methods and the reasons why they stayed in piracy, and would help us design a better plan,” he told attendees.

Gerstein showed attendees a short video of a TV content pirate who explained he was looking for redemption and decided to speak publicly about his experience as a pirate of premium content for 17 years. He conceded that, while a pirate, he was afraid of being caught but continued doing it because of all the money he was making. But, after his kids were born, it became a “no-brainer” for him to leave that business behind, he said.

Two “interesting” things that NAGRA learned from the pirate were how much  of a deterrent effect the industry’s anti-piracy actions made it for him to continue making money as a pirate and “how easily he made the switch from set-top box piracy to OTT piracy,” according to Gerstein.

NAGRA, he continued, is “looking at how these methods and motivations are affecting the piracy market in general and, as an industry, working together to do more to disrupt pirates like these and make sure that legitimate owners are finding all of your valuable content.”

The focus is on three areas: threat intelligence; exploring the piracy sector by doing a “deep dive” into it to analyze the methods used and expose critical actors and infrastructure; and investigation services to help drive enforcement actions, he explained.

To view the session, click here.

The 2023 Content Protection Summit was presented by Fortinet and sponsored by Convergent, Signiant, Verimatrix, Eluvio, NAGRA, PDG Consulting and EIDR. The event was produced by MESA, in association with NAB and the Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA).