M+E Daily

“Where Security and AI Collide” is the theme of the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit, the premiere gathering of the top security and asset protection minds in the M&E industry.

The full-day event at the Culver Theatre in Culver City will see industry stakeholders mingle with counterparts, demo the latest offerings from top Hollywood vendors, and watch presentations, with an emphasis on the intersection of AI and security.

Keynotes, panel discussions, and technology showcases are designed to offer senior-level content and information security experts the key information around the latest in content protection across the entire supply chain for entertainment.

Production security, post-production workflows and the growing ecosystems of platforms and connectivity that are driving the secure content creation and distribution process.

Additionally, anti-piracy and IP protection will be covered as our industry works collaboratively to secure our most important assets.

Here’s a look at what’s on the agenda:

• Following welcome remarks, Lee Kent, content protection manager for beIN Media Group, the Qatari global sport and entertainment network that distributes entertainment, live sports, and major international events, will deliver the opening keynote. Preparing, presenting, and protecting major live events is a core challenge for the industry, both from a streaming and a broadcast distribution perspective. Kent’s presentation — “Securing the World Cup: Going for the Win!” — will take attendees through the planning, set-up, and execution of one of the most successful overall efforts to protect the biggest and most hotly anticipated sporting event of the world, the FIFA Men’s World Cup.

• Sam Bahun, VP of sales for the Americas at Friend MTS, will tackle one of the toughest content protection challenges the industry faces today. In the session “Broadening the Spectrum of Protecting Live Content (Part II)” Bahun will analyse the challenge from different perspectives across our industry, and how it all comes together when you have mere moments (seconds, even) to detect fraudulent streams. A critical factor is identifying their routes and getting them terminated, in ways that drive consumers to the licensed channels and away from the pirates.

• Industry experts will present “Hacking the Hackers: Taking an Alternate Approach,” a panel discussion that shares how you can take the fight directly to the scammers, using their tools and approaches against them. This novel approach can have dramatic deterrent effects for the media and entertainment community and especially the customers whom they prey upon. This session talks through scenarios of those that conduct such work, the results, and the feeling of giving these scammers a taste of their own medicine. Alex Pickering, director, content security for BBC Studios and CDSA president Richard Atkinson will discuss.

• In “This Time it Matters: The Grand Convergence Underpinning AI” Richard Atkinson, president of CDSA, and Benjamin Toombs, manager of DTC fraud prevention for Warner Bros. Discovery and co-chair of the CDSA AI Working Group, will touch on the breadth of AI, while also providing a perspective on how to embrace the opportunities and not to be fearful or reactive. There is a true revolution going on across all industries around the world. AI represents an incredible opportunity as it is being leveraged by just about every aspect of technology and life in general … and while there are amazing gains there are also many terrifying threats and nefarious uses of the technology.

• Next is the panel discussion “CDSA Working Group Highlight: Addressing Crew On/Off-Boarding.” The constant onboarding and off-boarding of production crew members across major elements of M&E has considerable cost and timing implications against an overall industry effort to work faster, be more agile and achieve greater efficiencies. CDSA and MovieLabs are attacking this space from both ends, with CDSA’s Production ID Working Group driving a near-term effort to make operational efficiency improvements via best practices, while MovieLabs is developing a “North Star” vision for our industry that defines key transitional elements that CDSA can then air towards. Hear from panelists engaged in both endeavors, and the value they see in this effort.

• Keith Ritlop, VP of enterprise and production technology for NBCUniversal, and co-chair of production security work streams at CDSA, will deliver the presentation “Using AI to Drive Efficiencies in Production and Post.” In this session he will review some of the ways in which the industry is leveraging AI in production technology to help reduce “friction” and drive systems consolidation to better support creative workflows. Hear about the efficiencies which can be gained and what best practices can be employed to ensure we are using the technology to the best of its ability.

• Nick Matlach, President, IoLiberum, and Evelynn Glausman, General Manager, IoLiberum, will present “A Look at the Legal and Moral Challenges of AI.” The speed of the development, training, and leveraging of AI is leading many people to raise significant concerns over some of the legal and moral implications of using the technology. There are so many questions around who owns the rights to the materials which AI engines are being trained on and what is real or fake. As the use of this technology becomes increasingly pervasive, we need to try to find some answers. This session will explore this landscape and provide some perspectives on how to weigh up the opportunities and the risks.

• “CDSA Highlight: Securing the Broad Product Supply Chain via CDSA’s Copyright & Licensing Working Group” will dive into the progress of the working group. Consumer product development and manufacturing of IP from film, TV, and games is a multi-billion-dollar industry…which is fraught with risk due to the early timing, distributed nature of the process and the ultimate value of the products. The CDSA’s Copyright & Licensing Working Group has embarked on a multi-year effort to engage with the Licensing Community in a broad way with their “Spoiler Alert” awareness campaign.

• Best known for his Emmy-nominated 1987 animated feature film The Brave Little Toaster and for creating visual effects for the pioneering 1982 film Tron, animator, director, and Disney Imagineer Jerry Rees has been an animation industry mainstay since Pete’s Dragon in 1977. He’s seen technologies and techniques come and go, but at the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit (CPS), presented by the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), Rees will dive into the newest revolutionary filmmaking tool: AI. His afternoon creative keynote — “How AI is enabling the Storyteller’s Vision” — serves as a continuation of the conversation on the intersection between “AI and Creativity” with CDSA’s new “Creative in Residence” offering valuable insights into how multiple players come together to develop mind-blowing AI physical experiences.

• Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Eluv.io, and Ken Gerstein, VP of sales for NAGRA Anti-Piracy and Nexguard, will offer an inside look at the newest innovations in video content security leveraging the companies’ joint capabilities. The afternoon session — “Premium Streaming: Per Session End-to-End Content Security (VOD & Live)” — will present real-world use cases, and see Munson and Gerstein discuss the industry’s first integration of forensic watermarking into Eluvio’s global blockchain Fabric for premium content distribution, and more.

• Next is “Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative & Extensive Leverage of AI.” All this talk about AI is great, but how is it being leveraged to help us and make our creative lives better? This session will focus on how Adobe is leveraging AI (and has been for some time) to achieve greater content authenticity, easier and safer content generation, and more effective fraud prevention, while also enabling amazing user creativity and efficiency.

Todd Burke, principal solutions consultant for Adobe and CDSA board member will discuss enhancing tools and workflows through AI. Using AI bots for advanced fraud detection will be tackled by Michael Draper, senior director of digital fraud and consumer protection for Adobe. And Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy and education for the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), will share how his organisation is involved.

• In “Google’s Perspective on Generative AI & Security” We hear from Google Cloud as they work to stay ahead of the threats while leveraging the opportunities.

• “ME-ISAC’s Anatomy of a Breach: MGM Grand & Caesars Palace” will feature Jess Levine, threat analyst with CDSA’s ME-ISAC, and Chris Taylor, director of CDSA’s ME-ISAC and global security director at Skydance.

• “How AI Impacts Security Compliance” will feature experts from Convergent Risks and Digital Silence. Generative AI is in nearly every conversation and will touch us in everything we do from email and social media, through to new SaaS applications we develop and our use of 3rd party solutions. Risk will increase in proportion to the level of AI interaction. Without defined best practice and security compliance how can we be confident that AI is working for us for rather than against us in public cloud environments.

• “CDSA Highlight: Hardening the Streaming Ecosystem via CDSA Security of Streaming Devices Working Group” discusses the strategic and holistic approach being taken by our community to address challenges in the entire streaming ecosystem that starts at the device level. With a collective goal of hardening an ever-evolving landscape, we have built several work streams that complement the overall objective of the primary group which is led by Netflix.

• Ted Schilowitz, futurist and EVP of Paramount Global, is set to deliver the closing keynote. His presentation — “Ready, Fire, Aim – The Impact of the Increasing Speed of Technological Evolution” — will feature Schilowitz, Seth Shapiro, managing partner of Digital Asset Advisors and partner with Alpha Transform Holdings, and Michael Smiley, director of systems engineering for Fortinet, as they discuss the impact of new technologies on our industry, businesses, and lives, now and in the future. The power of miniature transistors, and the silicon that binds and activates that magic, is undeniable in its transformation of humanity. What we do with that silicon in the many form factors it lives today, from the browser to mobile computing to all the ways that data flow that enables the world to drive our hyperconnected global society, all living on binary compute functions, is truly awe-inspiring. And we are just really getting started on this journey of the power of computing. In the era of AI, ML, blockchain, and XR, this already profound impact will be multiplied by the speed at which these changes will impact our lives, both at work and at home.

Produced by MESA, the Content Production Summit is presented by Fortinet, and sponsored by Convergent Risks, Friend MTS, Amazon Studios Technology, Indee, NAGRA, EIDR, and Eluv.io, in association with CDSA and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).

To register for the event, click here. To join CDSA or sponsor the Content Production Summit, contact [email protected].