KOLKATA: With the tectonic shift in technology, piracy has found new ways to expand its reach and impact. And given the ongoing lean period in TV and movie releases, pirates are charting new waters for prey. Streaming platforms, which are investing heavily in premium content, offer easy pickings. While stringent regulation is the need of the hour, major over-the-top (OTT) platforms are devising comprehensive techniques to check this threat.
One of the leading OTT services in India, SonyLIV, is now moving away from basic solutions to a 360 degree approach. SonyLIV technology head Manish Verma said in a webinar hosted by indiantelevision.com that the platform is now looking at advanced measures like watermarking, fingerprinting and code protection to safeguard its content. It is now in the process of evaluating how they can utilise some of these tools to reduce piracy.
Presently, DRM is the preferred mode of encryption for the platform. But Verma admits that DRM has certain loopholes as well, especially when it comes to screen mirroring. Hence, the platform is in talks with vendors and partners to find out other ways to counter piracy. As part of its enhanced security measures, SonyLIV recently started a two-way authentication with username and one time passwords, instead of the traditional login with password system.
According to ZEE5 India technology head Tushar Vohra, creating a barrier is very important, as is instilling the fear of getting caught among pirates. To this end, tracing the source of a breach can be helpful. For example, ZEE5 will launch a forensic watermarking for its web player this month itself and later across all devices. This step will enable the platform to track the source of pirated content. Hence, Vohra is hopeful that there would be a decline in piracy rate within six months.
Echoing Vohra’s bent of mind, Verma said: “We need to put deterrence in terms of making it difficult to pirate the content, degrading the experience for pirated content. When a consumer is not getting that experience of premium content on illegal sites, they will come back to our platform.”
Both tech experts concurred that there is no particular trend of piracy in the Indian market. But Vohra mentioned an interesting fact: premium Indian content is being pirated more outside the country. Some contradictions do exist. While ZEE5 saw an increase in piracy during the lockdown, SonyLIV’s Verma said that the tendency to pay for premium content went up during the same period.
“We have put in machine learning through which we can detect multiple users logging in or consumer consuming content for a longer duration of time. We can do a token revocation; we can go from the back end and revoke the token if we see some sort of abnormality in the behaviour. I think we are making it difficult to pirate the content,” Verma added.
The panellists agreed that rationalising cost structure for security will lead to higher adoption of technology solutions. ZEE5, which is already investing five-seven per cent for data and application security, has now developed a full-fledged security team, due to join in December.
