The landscape of digital piracy is undergoing a significant transformation, with illegal streaming services becoming increasingly sophisticated. Recent industry reports highlight that global piracy remains a multi-billion-pound threat, with live sports and premium entertainment being targeted by highly organised criminal networks.
As pirate operations move beyond simple web links to complex, paid subscription models, content owners and broadcasters face an escalating challenge in protecting their intellectual property and legitimate revenue streams. To tackle piracy, you need a robust content protection programme including watermarking, blocking and enforcement. Monitoring is the key service that underpins these solutions to tackle piracy head-on.
What is anti-piracy monitoring?
Monitoring is the fundamental process of identifying and locating unauthorised redistribution of content across the digital landscape. It serves as the primary intelligence layer for any anti-piracy strategy, providing the visibility required to understand the scale of piracy faced by an organisation, and the information needed to take remedial action.
Effective monitoring ensures that whenever content is stolen and shared—whether on the open web, social media, IPTV services or through illicit streaming devices—it is detected quickly and accurately. Locating this stolen content enables remedial actions and enforcements, actions which are essential to converting pirate audiences back to legitimate subscription services and maintaining the value of exclusive distribution rights.
How do monitoring systems operate?
Anti-piracy monitoring systems, such as those developed by Friend MTS, function by simulating end-user interactions to navigate web pages and applications to locate the sources of piracy. These automated systems operate 24 hours per day, searching for infringing content across various vectors. When a potential instance of piracy is identified, the technology uses video fingerprinting to match the illicit stream against the original content with high precision.
What types of piracy monitoring are there?
To address the diverse nature of content theft, several distinct types of monitoring are utilised to ensure full coverage of the piracy landscape:
Global Monitoring
This involves automated systems operating from strategic locations worldwide to identify illicit sources regardless of their geography, providing an elastically scalable solution that matches the global reach of modern pirates.
Regional Monitoring
This focuses on local and market-adjacent regions, using localised keyword searches and access methods to identify threats that specifically target local audiences and operators.
Closed IPTV Monitoring
This specialised service goes "behind the curtain" of subscription-based pirate IPTV services that operate behind paywalls and authentication screens. It allows for the collection of evidence for further enforcement strategies, such as legal proceedings and payment disruption.
Social Media Monitoring
Working in partnership with major platforms, this service searches for illegally shared videos on sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, enabling rapid removal before content goes viral.
Why should you choose Friend MTS monitoring?
Friend MTS monitoring services provide access to industry-leading technology refined over two decades of experience at the forefront of content protection. Our Emmy® award-winning video fingerprinting technology delivers 99.99% accuracy, ensuring that legitimate content is identified with surgical precision while avoiding false positives.
Our monitoring services leverage the Piracy Source Register™. This resource contains millions of records, including locations, addresses, and metadata, forming a data map that monitoring services use to locate targets. These services allow Friend MTS to offer an unrivalled scale of coverage that spans the open web, social media, and even closed, paywalled IPTV services that remain invisible to other vendors.
A great example of these services in action is Friend MTS’s partnership with a European broadcaster. FMTS delivers global monitoring services and automated technology to scan for and identify infringing content across thousands of non-live assets. By combining this extensive surveillance with expert enforcement, we have successfully identified over 1.7 million piracy incidents, ensuring 84% of the illegal content is removed to protect the client's geographical exclusivity and revenue. You can learn more about this successful story here.
AI and the future of monitoring
The future of content protection is being defined by the integration of Artificial Intelligence and adaptive intelligence capabilities, and FMTS has already utilised these technologies to deliver greater scale and scope across all monitoring services, making them faster, deeper, and wider in scope. The deployment of new, innovative AI and adaptive intelligence capabilities enables our monitoring services to locate and identify piracy 70% faster, increasing the number of available targets in our Piracy Source Register™ by more than 50%.
At FMTS, we're constantly developing and deploying new AI-driven technologies to provide a deeper understanding of the piracy landscape and its impact on your content and revenues.
To learn more about monitoring, contact the Friend MTS team today.
