Pirates Out Of Carribean
Content piracy goes on being a growing concern for the marketing and entertainment space. According to a NAGRA report, piracy became a billion-dollar industry in the United States alone. It’s clear that piracy is a big business.
Content piracy goes on being a growing concern for the marketing and entertainment space. According to a NAGRA report, piracy became a billion-dollar industry in the United States alone. It’s clear that piracy is a big business.
Pirate organizations are managed by individuals and supported by teams of highly skilled engineers, a tricky supply chain and cutting-edge marketing and distribution techniques.
To truly understand the piracy business, one must understand the various players and their unique roles in the piracy theatre.
Some players are obvious: pirate retailers and wholesalers. Others play often not realized passive role. And then there are the content consumers who don’t realize that a service of exciting value may not be at all what it seems.
The Top Dogs
The pirate service wholesalers are the heart. Functioning outside of common media space, its infrastructure is the most complex piece of the pirate ecosystem.
When it comes to content, wholesalers work within an intricate network that makes stealing and restreaming content possible. Often, they group to share content access costs.
From a technological standpoint, a wholesaler may be very professional at programming, or even develop own technologies and use own servers and software to snatch content and break storages. However, they can outsource all these tools.
With all components in place, the wholesaler operation then feeds the consumer-facing players – the pirate service retailer. There are approximately 3,500 pirate retailer storefronts that sell subscriptions to U.S. consumers.
As providers of such services do not pay for distribution rights, their expenses are low, so they can merge enormous content libraries compounding seductive offer for a user.
The Squad
Pirate retail and wholesale services cannot function without proper support. The success of these shady business relies on third-party bystanders that make content piracy possible.
There is a mere quantity of services these media filibusters use to succeed. This includes payment processors, including credit card companies, hosting providers and CDNs, which support pirate websites and their streaming video infrastructures, website services and social media sites, that are needed by pirates to generate marketing momentum to drive viewers to professional looking storefronts. No active roles are played by the services mentioned above but they do make the piracy possible.
The Aggrieved
Pirates get their profit selling subscriptions and advertising. As well as by selling devices that have pre-installed apps for watching illegally obtained content. Even unknown to audience, these are not the only ways illegal IPTV services make money.
Pirates generate revenue by partnering with hackers to install malware in free apps that expose consumers to risk or theft of their personal and financial data, cryptocurrency mining, adware, ransomware, and use computers to perform distributed denial-of-service attacks. These activities are different from the well-known content piracy. Nevertheless, they are substantial part of the pirate economics.
The Guardians
All the industry players work to defeat pirates. Rights holders, operators, legislators, and various industry associations take proactive approach. The key factor is a vast set of anti-piracy technologies protecting assets from villains.
Forensic watermarking can be used to trace content leaks back to the source. Scanning for watermarks can identify the redistribution of content and terminate illicit.
The merge of anti-piracy and legal services meets the piracy challenge. This includes comprehensive investigations, tracing, intelligence and data analytics capabilities to identify all the dimensions of the problem alongside its geographical spread. When combined with watermarking and IP-blocking, website blocking and DNS redirection, the solution delivers impressive results as NAGRA reported.
With the right anti-piracy strategy and ability to execute in place, pirates cannot offer consumers the service they expect. If a pirate service does not deliver quality and content, users may likely turn to legitimate ways to entertain themselves. This is where service provider has a chance working with reliable marketing and user retention strategies: trial periods, high-quality and premium content.