Owners of video content on OTT platforms must be wary of piracy

Providing exclusive content is a top priority for video streaming services because it is essential to the service's long-term viability. The OTT market continues to grow. One of its biggest and most powerful companies needs to keep its content safe from any hacker, or its value to users will be compromised.

OTT platforms profit from being the first to offer any new video on demand (VoD) content. For the most part, that's why people sign up for their service. Anyone who follows the over-the-the-top (OTT) industry knows, however, that as soon as studios release premium content online, pirates sites begin streaming it, even if it is DRM protected content. Pirate networks make popular shows like Game of Thrones available to viewers around the world. As much as 77% of the audience for Season 8 of this series was found to come from the piracy ecosystem, according to an industry watch group

Piracy propaganda is widely disseminated through the use of search engines and social media platforms. Numerous pirate websites can be found all over. Within minutes of being made available on VoD platforms, they begin hosting pirated versions of their content. High traffic and new content are quickly indexed by search engine algorithms. In addition, well-known social media pages begin to talk about them. There are a number of factors that affect legitimate OTT platforms' revenue, such as these:

Content owners rely on video watermarking to catch pirates because it is not always possible to stop piracy during live events or at the time of a new release. In order to thwart pirates, they encode all video assets with watermarks that can be deciphered. Using these watermarks after a leak helps content owners locate the user whose device leaked a video asset. Each watermark contains session, device, and user identifier information.

At this point, content owners can either block the offending user or take legal action against an organised group.