M+E Connections

Counterspy leverages technology first developed by the company’s cybersecurity team back in 2021 to offer an innovative new way to counter the rise in video piracy in an era where streaming apps are prevalent.

Counterspy is a standalone product within Verimatrix’s anti-piracy team, engineered to prevent video content theft, shield apps from attack, and provide ongoing piracy threat prediction, detection and response services.

Counterspy goes beyond traditional methods to ensure top-tier security for media app subscribers, safeguarding content across various devices. It fills the gap in authentication created by the shift from operator-controlled set top box hardware to retail or app-based OTT clients, allowing operators to distribute content confidently while preventing piracy.

With Counterspy, each app instance is authenticated and tied to a specific subscriber, ensuring transparency and control over access. By safeguarding the authentication token from theft or manipulation, Counterspy prevents abuse and ensures legitimate access to content, going above and beyond traditional DRM vendors.

What makes Counterspy stand out:

–Unique Protection and Threat Detection from the Video Service Provider to the Consumer Device: Verimatrix Counterspy effortlessly brings security into the unmanaged consumer device via the video app, something that has been lacking since the explosion of OTT streaming services that use consumers’ own devices. Verimatrix combined the best of its anti-piracy technologies with its cybersecurity innovations to create a bold new approach to tackling the piracy problem – a breakthrough leap forward.

–AI/ML-Driven Real-Time Protection: Leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Counterspy can quickly identify piracy signals and cybersecurity threats, allowing for the real-time deployment of countermeasures.

–Multi-Layered Security Approach: Counterspy builds on proven technologies such as DRM and watermarking, with a new generation of sophisticated app protection and piracy monitoring tools to detect suspicious activity. This allows video service providers to pinpoint suspicious behaviour at its source – as it’s happening – to thwart bad actors without impacting the experience of legitimate service subscribers. By shielding the app, Counterspy also protects personal information and payment card details belonging to video service subscribers. This multi-layered approach to video content + app security, along with the ability to deploy real-time anti-piracy countermeasures, allows streaming operators to continuously evolve their response to emerging threats – staying one step ahead of the pirates.

“With our release of Counterspy, Verimatrix is at the forefront of the innovation needed to fight today’s sophisticated pirates within a vastly connected content viewing ecosystem,” said Andrew Bear, head of anti-piracy business at Verimatrix. “Yesterday’s security approaches are no longer enough to protect both revenue and content. Counterspy enables streaming operators to immediately fight back against pirates that seek to use the latest and often unnoticed business-draining techniques. We see Counterspy as a giant leap forward for security in the M&E industry because it can be directly linked to millions of dollars in prevented piracy-related losses as well as notable operating cost savings.”

For operators, Counterspy targets piracy and revenue leakage, enhances content security and app protections, and helps prevent the compromise of user data. A Verimatrix telco customer who deployed an early release version of Counterspy realised an OPEX savings of $300,000, and they prevented direct piracy losses of $21 million in one year. Counterspy’s design for speedy and straightforward integration into streaming video clients allows operators to detect and efficiently counteract piracy directly at its source – serving as an “autonomous security solution” that stands in stark contrast to traditional methods.

Counterspy is part of the Verimatrix Streamkeeper suite of security solutions and can be flexibly deployed alongside other Verimatrix technologies, including Multi-DRM and Watermarking