Content is a prime target for theft. In an age of ubiquitous digital distribution, online video piracy has exploded, costing the global media sector tens of billions annually. The battle against this rising tide of illegal content sharing requires sophisticated, automated technology, such as video fingerprinting, to stay protected.
The increasing need for protection
Content piracy is a huge problem and is highly organised. In terms of revenue generation for organised crime, piracy ranks alarmingly high, trailing behind only drug trafficking and human trafficking.
This massive revenue leakage poses an existential threat to media organisations. Online video content piracy is currently estimated to be a $75 billion per year problem globally, and this figure is projected to reach $125 billion by 2028, representing an annual growth rate of nearly 11%.
All types of content are affected. A recent poll of sports fans revealed that 47% had streamed football illegally. Protecting live events, linear broadcasts, and on-demand libraries from unauthorised distribution is therefore critical to maintaining revenue streams and the integrity of your content investment.
What is video fingerprinting?
When a content monitoring service is tasked with protecting valuable media assets, it needs to quickly and correctly match suspicious material captured from countless online sources and digital platforms against the original file. This can be achieved using video fingerprinting, a matching process that is similar to human fingerprinting.
The first step in this process is to generate a unique video fingerprint based on your original content. Just as a human fingerprint is unique to an individual, the video fingerprint is unique to a specific segment of video. These unique identifiers can automatically be matched to suspicious content, and identify a pirated copy among millions of other videos with forensic precision.
Once the suspicious content has been verified as an illegally shared copy by fingerprinting, further actions such as enforcement can be automatically invoked with the help of content security specialists.
Fingerprinting considerations
To ensure maximum accuracy, there are critical factors to consider when deploying a video fingerprinting solution.
First of all, it is important to avoid false positives. Advertisements that run during a live event or on a linear channel can cause issues. Since these ads do not form part of the actual content you own or wish to protect, matching against them can result in "false positive" reports.
An effective security provider should be able to support the insertion of markers to automatically identify advertisements within the original video stream. This suspends the fingerprint generation during the ad break, ensuring the ads do not become part of your protected content's signature.
Secondly, large-scale monitoring in the digital age is simply not possible through manual methods. While some monitoring services rely on teams of people to manually match videos, this approach is limited, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Only through the implementation of innovative, automated technologies like video fingerprinting can content owners process vast quantities of video in real-time.
Why choose Friend MTS video fingerprinting
Friend MTS deploys fingerprinting for some of the biggest names in entertainment and media, and our advanced video fingerprinting technology underpins our world-class monitoring services. Fully automated and highly scalable, our Emmy®-award-winning technology matches content to the original with unrivalled speed and accuracy. It's the engine that allows us to protect your content at the scale and precision demanded by today's piracy landscape.
Want to find out more about video fingerprinting and how it can secure your content pipeline? Contact the team today to learn more about our award-winning technology.
