Choosing the right content monitoring and takedown solution is critical to protecting your content. With many vendors and technologies on the market, it’s essential to ask the right questions.
These 12 questions are designed to help you evaluate whether a vendor’s approach to monitoring and enforcement truly meets your needs – not just on paper, but in real-world performance, responsiveness and results.
Q1. Does your vendor have a monitoring solution proven to disrupt revenue-damaging content fraud?
To protect your revenue effectively, content monitoring and enforcement must deliver both comprehensive detection and meaningful disruption of piracy. When it comes to evaluating potential vendors, it is essential to check whether they have a track record of success with customers in addressing similar platforms and challenges. Tackling multiple piracy vectors is critical to achieving lasting impact.
A qualified content protection vendor should be able to conduct a comprehensive audit to assess the scale and nature of your piracy exposure. This includes identifying where your content is being illegally distributed and determining the actions needed to remove those instances. By using specialised technologies and curated intelligence and insights gathered from years of experience protecting high-value live and on-demand content, an expert provider should be able to detect piracy across a wide range of sources and clearly outline the scope of the threat to your business.
Also, in order to be effective, piracy disruption requires collaboration with a broad ecosystem – Internet Service Providers (ISPs), social media platforms, law enforcement agencies and other key partners. A credible vendor should be an established player in this network, capable of driving swift and coordinated takedown action.
Once you have ensured that your vendor is an established content protection expert and a trusted member of a wide network of organisations in the content security ecosystem, it’s time to ask the ‘deeper dive’ questions that will help you understand whether this vendor’s solutions suit your revenue protection needs.
Q2. Does your vendor offer truly global coverage?
Content fraud knows no borders. Pirates can distribute stolen content widely and rapidly, bypassing geographical restrictions set by licensing agreements. As a result, it is critical that content monitoring services operate across multiple territories. For example, if your live sports content is leaked by a distribution partner or subscriber in Latin America, it will likely appear in other regions within minutes. It is common for viewers to accept foreign-language commentary in exchange for cheaper access to sports.
A content fraud detection and takedown service needs to be geared appropriately to have that global reach. Highly scalable technology, business processes and staff need to be in place to enable global detection operations and response 24x7x365.
Additionally, a vendor with global operations can support your expansion into new markets by addressing region-specific piracy challenges – such as metadata localisation, transcreation, and tailored monitoring approaches.
Q3. Is your vendor’s solution effective against pirates’ changing tactics?
Pirates are extremely resourceful in finding new ways to circumvent security measures. Since they don’t have to pay for the expensive content they profit from, they can easily reinvest their illegal revenue towards their “R&D” efforts. As a result, legitimate service providers need to ensure that their content protection and anti-piracy solutions are robust against vulnerabilities.
Make sure that your vendor has the depth of expertise and technology required to accurately discover, capture, map and analyse the constantly evolving tactics employed by pirates, not only to steal content, but also to circumvent the technology designed to protect it. How well does your vendor understand the piracy landscape? What tools do they employ, and how much experience do they have with real-world content fraud?
Q4. How accurate is your vendor’s monitoring and enforcement solution when operating at large scale?
While it’s important to make sure valuable content is protected from fraud and illegal redistribution, legitimate content owners and service providers partnering with an anti-piracy company must make sure that takedowns are accurate, especially when large volumes of content are involved. Mistakes can result in legitimate content being removed from your own channels or from other legitimate channels, leading to negative publicity and damaging your relationship with distribution partners.
Understanding the processes and technologies an anti-piracy company uses is key. Learning how content is detected, whether there is a reliable and robust content verification process in place, what this process entails and what technologies are used, and the effectiveness of the remedial mechanisms – these are all important points to consider. These points all need to be vetted through the lens of scale: it’s much easier to achieve accuracy with small numbers while large-scale operations present a much higher level of complexity.
A highly-scalable model that combines fingerprinting and other verification technologies for automated content identification, backed up by human oversight for cases that require deeper examination, is extremely efficient at identifying false positives and preventing takedown errors while 24x7 remedial mechanisms ensure a high level of responsiveness.
Q5. Does your vendor address all major sources of content fraud or just open web?
Financially damaging content fraud takes many forms. While illegal restreaming on open websites is better known, significant revenue is also lost to piracy via social media platforms, mobile apps, streaming devices, paywalled pirate IPTV services, various add-ons, plugins and more. Open and ad-supported pirate streaming sites are just part of a broader threat landscape. Understanding which threat(s) affect your business most is key. If your content is being redistributed illegally across multiple channels, ensure your vendor has a proven track record of detecting and disrupting piracy across all of them – not just the most visible ones.
Q6. Is your vendor a trusted partner of major social media platforms?
Social media misuse has become a major challenge for content owners and rights holders. The problem is driven by the ease of video sharing and the vast reach of these platforms. Even low-quality clips can be damaging – viewers often accept poor resolution if it gives them free access to valuable content. The issue is further compounded by non-compliant platforms that lack robust enforcement measures.
The largest social media platforms pose the highest risk to the value of your content when shared without authorisation. Many of these platforms have built-in rights management solutions (e.g. Facebook’s Right Manager, YouTube’s Content ID, etc.), so it’s crucial your vendor operates a compliance programme with these to ensure that takedowns are swift. It’s also worth checking if your vendor has proven relationships and enforcement processes for effective takedowns with regional social media platforms, ensuring faster removal of infringing content across all markets.
