14 DAY TRIAL // Pirate video streams are pretty much the easiest (and the most affordable) way to watch content that’s exclusively available on a pay-per-view basis, mostly thanks to users worldwide who know that it’s impossible for copyright holders to take action fast.
In most of the cases, taking down a live feed before the event ends is impossible and even if companies actually manage to do it, there are hundreds of similar alternative streams that go live in the meantime.
Cisco, however, has the answer to this problem, as the firm developed a new technology that promises to block video streams as they are published online. And the solution is easier than you’d think.
Basically, when copyright holders are trying to prevent others from watching a certain event, they attempt to shut down the feed, and since so many others are published online while they do that, it’s pretty much mission impossible. So Cisco says that its tech will no longer do that, but identify the source and get it offline. In other words, Cisco is cutting off the source, so no other feeds could be published.
How it works
How it does that? It’s all thanks to a new service that is called Streaming Piracy Prevention (SPP), which automatically identifies illegal feeds and takes them offline.
“Using a forensic watermark it identifies the subscriptions/sessions used to source the content, and shuts down the source through the video security system - all in real-time. The process is fully automated, ensuring a timely response to incidents of piracy,” the firm explains.
There’s no need of sending a legal notice and third-parties aren’t involved, Cisco explains, so it all happens instantly. The second a certain account is detected as the source of a live stream, it’s automatically banned.
“In order to tackle live event piracy, Cisco and Friend MTS (FMTS) have partnered to put their respective technologies to work. FMTS’s market leading piracy monitoring capabilities feed the Cisco SPP service with real-time pirated video feeds found on the open Internet, which are used by SPP to locate the source of the leak and shut it down,” the firm added.
The biggest challenge is certainly achieving zero false positives rate. If SPP mistakenly flags a certain account as streaming illegal feeds and takes it offline, the owner is automatically banned, and it’s not hard to understand how frustrating this can become if no piracy is involved.
Furthermore, there might be countries where prior takedown notices are still required by law, so although on paper it looks great, not everything might be milk and honey for Cisco’s new solution.