Even as pay-TV subscriptions are expected to reach new heights in high-growth Asian markets such as India, Indonesia and China, media piracy continues to be an enduring concern for pay-TV operators across the region.
There are various reasons for this. In China, for example, barriers to the market for foreign media operators, especially those from the West, have been exceedingly constricting. Chinese consumers with an appetite for U.S. based content are compelled to turn to illegal programming over the Internet. Advancements in communications technology have also contributed to the piracy problem. The availability of high-speed Internet via fiber optic technology in developed countries like Singapore and Australia are expected to give rise to “re-broadcast piracy” where pirate encoders intercept a television connection and feed content to downstream users.
Going forward in 2013, such developments are expected to impact the pay-TV market, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. In brief, here are my top five predictions:
1. Pay-TV card sharing piracy will continue to challenge the APAC pay-media industry. Decryption key sharing of pay-TV programming via circumvention devices is likely to be increasingly severe, and we can expect to see this issue intensify in countries such as China where barriers to market are high because of regulatory restrictions on foreign media content.
2. Online “re-broadcast piracy” will rise in APAC countries with high-speed broadband Internet via fiber optic connection. This new threat is exacerbated by government-initiated broadband Internet development initiatives in countries such as Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. This technology provides a minimum of 100Mb/second internet speeds by using fiber optic connection for homes. The problem arises after the content leaves the pay-TV provider’s set-top box. The TV connection is intercepted and the content is fed into a pirate encoder for rebroadcasting over the Internet and received by multiple downstream pirate “subscribers”. Only robust watermarking systems can respond to this emerging threat. Watermarked content can be identified and the source located, thereby providing the option to automatically or manually take down the offending pirate source.
3. Pay-TV pirates are evolving their business models by embracing new ways of monetising their services. Increasingly, consumers are turning to pirated content online not only because of the price factor, but because televisions shows and films are often made available sooner in certain markets and also many consumers have multiple ways to access the content (tables, phones, computers, set-top boxes etc). We also predict that some of the larger pay-TV pirates will try to migrate from an illegal business model based on stolen content to a legal or semi-legal model based on agreement with some content vendors, most probably by trying to expand their business into new markets or to new consumers.
4. Enforcement activity in the search engine space will see a large increase. Regardless of the download method, search engines are the conduit that most people use to discover where unauthorised content is located. Many times, consumers are simply looking for content with no direct intention to pirate it, until they pull up a large number of illegal results and take the path of least resistance. Taking down search result links to infringing content is just as important as enforcing on the content itself.
5. There will continue to be more interactions between rights-holders and service providers, much like the agreements between the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) and major content holders in the U.S. ISPs and content owners will continue to establish agreements to have peer-topeer infringement notices be more effective using three or six-strike policies as well as alternatives.
It is important to understand that there are various forms and levels of piracy. In September 2012, Irdeto released a white paper that discusses evolving consumer media consumption patterns, known as The Piracy Continuum™, a framework that identifies the various forms of piracy, which is not a single behaviour, but rather a continuum of behaviours based on different motivations.
Without a doubt, the year ahead will continue to present a tougher set of challenges for the pay-TV industry, but as long as we endeavor to understand the root cause of piracy, we can use the appropriate approach to resolve the issue at hand and keep the pirates at bay.
