M+E Daily

CULVER CITY, Calif. — The 2022 FIFA World Cup only lasted a month. But the work beIN Media Group put into protecting it against piracy began 18 months beforehand and required massive collaborative efforts with every company involved in the supply chain.

The result? One of the most successful overall efforts to protect the biggest sporting event of the world.

That was the message from 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, during his opening keynote presentation “Securing the World Cup: Going for the Win!” at the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit, the premiere gathering of the top security and asset protection minds in the M&E industry.

“We went from monthly calls, to weekly calls, to daily calls” among beIN’s security team and vendor partners leading up to the event, Kent said, with the company reaching out to everyone from AWS and Azure to YouTube and Twitch to prepare for battle against the inevitable piracy attempts.

It happened even before the first match began, with beIN’s broadcasts being made illicitly available on an internet key sharing (IKS) service, with thieves selling codes for $20 a pop.

Thanks to advance planning, beIN’s team knew exactly what to do: test purchases were made, technical analysis of the compromise kicks off, and nobody sleeps until technical disruptions against the pirates begins. In three days, the leak is plugged.

“The pirates reacted to what we were doing and it turned into a game of cat and mouse,” Kent said.

With the IKS offering shut down, pirates next turned to OTT as their primary source: a simple HDMI splitter, pay for a stream, and boom, you’re off to the races, sharing streams of World Cup matches. beIN was ready: its proprietary anti-piracy system, Pirate Hunter, quickly identified and blocked illicit accounts. “It became an around-the-clock job,” Kent said, noting a team of eight anti-piracy employees literally worked 24 hours a day at points.

Oh but the pirates weren’t done. Mad that beIN has shut them down at every turn, the pirates launch three DDoS attacks against the company over a 24-hour period. Those failed to have any impact.

As a last resort, pirates attempted to stream games across social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, you name it.

And while Kent had high praise for the hosting providers for quickly identifying and removing illegal streams, his praise was less effusive for some social media outlets, who took as long as 20 minutes to kill illicit streams. “Twenty minutes is not acceptable at all,” he said.

The reason beIN made protecting the World Cup look easy was because of the massive amount of preparation it did beforehand, Kent said. “You have to plan for what could happen, prepare for the worst,” he said. “We didn’t have any low-hanging fruit in our piracy ecosystem, and when you eliminate the casual pirates, you’re left with the well-organized criminal organizations.”

“Where Security and AI Collide” was the theme of the Content Production Summit. The full-day event at the Culver Theatre in Culver City will saw 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 were 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 were covered as the industry works collaboratively to secure its most important assets.

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