How Can AI Be Used to Beat Video Piracy
Beating Video Piracy With AI
Video streaming services are exploding rapidly. As a result, today, consumers of entertainment/ infotainment find it easier than ever before to access high-quality content for potentially endless media streaming. According to Statista, consumers around the world spent an average of 463 minutes or over 7.5 hours per day consuming media. The chart is expectedly led by Americans who consume around 369 minutes per day accessing the traditional media alone, with 363 minutes spent per day consuming digital media. This profusion of media platforms and the prevalence of entertainment and infotainment in our lives has thrown up opportunities for storytellers, screenwriters and production houses to capture our imagination and mint (serious!) money through adopting innovative business models.
- The issue of data theft, cyber crimes are becoming more frequent and commonplace.
However, there are certain roadblocks that have become magnified due to the digital bridge. The issue of data theft, cyber crimes are becoming more frequent and commonplace. Today’s hackers can access a larger area for potential attacks and are able to reach and target the consumers using systems that work for all kinds of terminals, including mobile devices. Illegal streaming is dangerous to the content consumers since these servers which host pirated content may carry malware that might infect consumers’ systems.
On the publisher’s side, video piracy has increased and is causing a significant dent in the bottom-line of the content publishing value chain, which relies on subscription and advertising revenues to fuel ambitious projects. According to a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, video piracy resulted in lost revenue of nearly $30 billion annually in the U.S. itself. The fan-favorite, Game of Thrones television series, which was estimated to have had 12 million American people tuned in to watch the Season 7 finale episode, is estimated to have been illegally downloaded more than a billion times for its season 7 alone.
- Innovative ideas to arrest or limit the menace of illegal downloads and online piracy
HBO, which produced this multiple Emmy-winning series, came up with innovative ideas to arrest or limit the menace of illegal downloads and online piracy. Some of these measures include inviting fans to participate in show games and advertising the DVD/Blu Ray box set. Perhaps more significantly, HBO has aggressively tied up with streaming media platforms in different countries across the globe to broadcast episodes simultaneously and encourage people to sign up for these platforms rather than illegally going via the route of illegal streaming.
- The emergence of intelligent artificial intelligence platforms
Technology is appearing as a long-term and viable solution to the piracy problem. The emergence of intelligent artificial intelligence platforms is aiding the efforts to identify servers that host illegally sourced content quickly. These platforms do this by crawling the world wide web first to create a repository of URLs. Then it applies machine learning and artificial intelligence using computer vision, natural language processing and associated technologies to identify websites that are/ or likely to be hosting and serving illegally sourced content. Convolutional neural networks trained with millions of images can identify illegal content by tracking broadcaster logos, producer watermarks, sports jerseys, and various other data points.
Such artificial intelligence-based solutions can scale up the content protection efforts by actively monitoring the marketplaces, social media networks, search engines, and P2P torrent marketplaces. Technology will help human operators manage the complexity of navigating through the world-wide-web and the ever mushrooming piracy websites and social networks to work with law enforcement agencies. The copyright laws differ across geographies and this creates a problem where the IP address of the server hosting the illegal content is originating in a different country.
Technology, bolstered by the advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, plays a crucial role in quickly identifying content piracy and alerting human operators to take effective and quick actions. For instance, Smart Protection, an artificial intelligence-driven platform, worked for a major Latin America-based football tournament to identify illegal streamings. The platform helped the tournament organizers identify several real-time accounts over social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch, hosting illegal match streaming. This real-time response helped the organizers to act and get these accounts suspended within minutes quickly.
- Blockchain
Another crucial technology that helps in this regard is blockchain, which can work along with artificial intelligence to identify and limit video piracy. Blockchain is essentially a special type of database, which functions as a decentralized ledger, and can hold data immutably. It means that information can not be edited, destroyed, and all transactions of the data, including copies, can be tracked. While blockchain technology is still in infancy and its applications outside of cryptocurrencies are still vague, the technology definitely holds massive potential at the time of writing to enable content creators and video producers to identify illegal piracies.
- Content Delivery Networks
Content Delivery Networks, which have emerged as an essential backbone in this entire video content delivery infrastructure, utilize advanced analytics and artificial intelligence technology to optimize content delivery and protect the server from attempted data hacks and DDoS attacks.
At Medianova, we bring expertise and experience in delivering enterprise-grade CDN solutions to enterprises of all sizes with world-class and cost-efficient CDN solutions that can optimize and improve site performance and content delivery experience. We use cutting-edge and advanced analytics technologies to deliver best-in-class performance and content scalability. We have helped several OTT platforms to provide a seamless content delivery experience to their end-users.
