What Is the Streaming Industry Doing to Solve its Piracy Problem?
Learn more about streaming piracy and content protection at Streaming Media's next event.
Watch the complete presentation at Streaming Media East, B204. Batten Down the Hatches: Stream Piracy and How to Protect Your Content, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Jason Thibeault: What has the industry done to date in terms of solving this problem, from a standards or specifications point of view?
Matt Tooley: We're trying to do a bunch of different things, but I think on the FTC side, we've worked with the FTC and they've come out with an enforcement action earlier this year that basically, a lot of the companies that make these stream boxes are just putting the FTC certification logo on it even though they haven't registered and certified it.
Jason Thibeault: Right.
Matt Tooley: The FTC announced they're gonna crack down on that, and it's like $150,000 fine and now we're working with the customs people to actually catch the stuff when it gets imported. Earlier we asked the FTC, asked the big e-commerce sites, Amazon and eBay, you know, don't permit the sale of boxes that are fully loaded. So they agreed to try to limit the sale of those.
Jason Thibeault: Oh, good.
Matt Tooley: We've also worked directly with some of 'em and you know if you try to go to Amazon and search for fully loaded Kodi, you won't find any results.
Jason Thibeault: Wow.
Matt Tooley: So, they've tried to make it harder. So we're trying to make it harder as part of, just instead of, you know, as a multi-approach of improve the security, but also make is more expensive for the pirates, you know. If we can make it harder to import the boxes and sell the boxes, we're also, there are some efforts to, with the company that makes one of the popular streaming boxes, they also still have legal customers who buy it.
Jason Thibeault: Right.
Matt Tooley: So they're now acknowledging and trying to work with, prevent, put mechanisms in place to prevent it from getting used improperly.
Jason Thibeault: Oh, great.
Matt Tooley: Then the industry has now recognized that if you kinda look in the standard space for content security, there's not a lot of published standards out there, right? I mean there's, it's kinda very specialized in, there's some stuff in the W3C stuff, there's some stuff buried down in the ITS stuff, but nothing that glues it all together. So, we're working with the Streaming Video Alliance and others to kinda take a first crack at putting something together to put some guidance in place, so that it's more than the tick the box.
Jason Thibeault: Yeah.
Matt Tooley: 'Cause I think what we're seeing is a lot of, I've ticked all the boxes, and people are saying to their box, I've ticked all the boxes, we're good, and they never look again. To I think, your conversation, that you heard at lunch of DRM's hard, so we didn't do it.
Jason Thibeault: And that's part of the problem with the FTC right now. The FTC, all the standards are for broadcast, right. So, the issue, there's no standard for streaming really, and because of that, and there's no stream theft in broadcast, so it suddenly becomes, there's an issue of how do we solve this problem from a standards point of view.
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