It’s important to check your vendor has existing examples of successful operations with other customers that have similar platforms and challenges. Ongoing monitoring of the industry’s most high-value content equips content security technology experts with expertise and experience to illustrate the scope of content fraud issues for your business.

Modern distribution allows pirates to spread stolen content in high quality far and wide, beyond any geographical restrictions imposed by content licensing agreements. A content fraud detection and takedown service needs to be geared appropriately to have the global reach. Appropriate highly scalable technology, business processes and staff need to be in place to enable global detection operations and response 24x7x365.

Make sure that your vendor has the depth of knowledge and technology that accurately captures, maps and analyses the constant evolution of tools and methods employed by pirates, not only to capture content, but to circumvent the technology that protects against this. How rich is your vendor’s knowledge of the piracy landscape? Which tools do they have in their toolkit, and how much experience do they have of real-world content fraud?

While it’s important to make sure valuable content is protected from fraud and illegal redistribution, legitimate content owners and service providers hiring an anti-piracy company need to ensure they won’t be incurring erroneous takedowns, especially when dealing with large volumes of content. Understanding the processes and technologies an anti-piracy company uses is key. These need to be vetted through the lens of scale.

While illegal restreaming on open web is often mentioned, revenue is lost to other types of piracy too. The catalogue of possible threats includes content fraud across social media, mobile apps, streaming devices, paywalled pirate IPTV services, various add-ons, plugins etc., in addition to open and ad-driven pirate streaming sites. Understanding the types of threat that have the greatest impact on your business is key.

Social media misuse has been a big problem for legitimate content providers due to the popularity of these platforms and the simplicity of sharing video content. It’s worth checking that your vendor operates a compliance programme with social media platforms to ensure that takedowns are swift. It’s also worth checking if your vendor has developed relationships and established enforcement processes with popular regional social media platforms.

Content of shorter duration is highly attractive. From comedy to sports highlights, this content is highly engaging and easy to share on social media. Some licensing agreements stipulate very strict rules and even such short duration content can only be shared by authorised sources. However, not all content monitoring solutions are capable of monitoring for content of short duration hence the importance of this question.

A content protection vendor is often required to supply admissible evidence when they face non-compliance. A traceable trail of issued and ignored legal notices, as well as other evidence, is crucial for content owners and service providers to build their case in court, and to win against fraudsters who damage their bottom line. So it’s important to check your vendor’s data retention policy and how it aligns with protocols set out by law enforcement.

The complexity of setting up coverage and distribution of a very popular global live event is staggering. Platforms have to be able to handle huge spikes in demand, and quality of experience is paramount. Any security technology deployed to protect this content needs to be rapidly scalable. In order for a monitoring service to be effective in protecting live content at scale, it needs to be highly automated.

As the value of live content quickly diminishes, the success of any fraud counteraction is measured in minutes if not seconds for such time sensitive content. Enforcement needs to be a part of highly automated monitoring that includes video capture and verification. Other bespoke enforcement processes need to be in place. It’s also worth checking if your vendor offers blocking services.

Businesses that allocate big budgets to content creation and distribution take a multifaceted approach to content protection which can become quite a complex undertaking. It is important therefore that each technology component works seamlessly with the rest of the stack. With independent security technology and service providers you can pick and choose the security components you actually need, rather than taking a whole bundle you might not.

Comprehensive piracy detection followed up by extensive enforcement in cooperation with other industry players can bring substantial changes to the piracy landscape – almost immediately in the case of live sports. Pirates move fast to get live content that they want to profit from and when enforcement actions make one source more difficult to access they will turn to the lowest-hanging fruit, away from the well-protected sources.