Waging war on online pirates – Friend MTS and Cisco

Friend MTS has recently formalised a partnership with global tech giant Cisco to support the company in developing its streaming piracy prevention service, which now relies on our technology to find the sources of illegal streaming of live content, and have them shut down.

Friend MTS (FMTS) specialises in securing broadcast and OTT streams, and as part of this, continuously analyses the volume of illegal streams across the world.

Amongst its most recent studies, FMTS has found more than 12,000 unique instances of high definition (HD) channels on pirate services.

These statistics were sourced from global Pay TV service providers – and the figure of 12,000 is HD content alone, and doesn’t account for the standard definition (SD) content.

Expanding the search to include SD resolution – which is the resolution most often aimed at mobile devices – the number of illegal streams identified by FMTS jumps to 22,000.

The problem is hitting almost all service providers, regardless of size, and costing them money, and these figures clearly highlight the very real threat to revenues and the sustainability of Pay TV live content.

This escalating problem of online, digital piracy and FMTS’ pioneering forensic technology, has led us to work with many of the world’s technology industry leaders, including Cisco, to devise ways to tackle the threat from digital piracy and illegal streaming of live TV content.

Locating and shutting down illegal streaming

American multinational technology conglomerate Cisco is the largest networking company in the world. Cisco is also one of the largest providers of Conditional Access (CA) and  Digital Rights Management (DRM) to the world’s leading Pay TV providers.

FMTS’ work with Cisco has involved us pioneering new ways of dealing with the illegal redistribution of content – the groundbreaking technology we have developed is capable of not only finding the pirates, but also immediately shutting them down.

Cisco’s Streaming Piracy Prevention (SPP) service utilises FMTS’ technology to locate illegal redistribution of content on the open internet and closed pirate networks.

This technology has been enhanced by incorporating  FMTS’ Broadcast iD  service. This identifies the viewing card of the subscriber pirating the content from a set top box, and shuts down the offending account through the Cisco CA system – all in real-time. The process is fully automated, ensuring a timely response to incidents of piracy.

Gone are the days of sending a legal notice and waiting to see if anyone will answer; Cisco’s offering to Pay TV operators, which is underpinned by Friend MTS’ technology, acts without the need to involve or gain cooperation from any third parties. This enables an enhanced level of retransmission prevention from set top boxes and allows service providers to take back control of their channels, maximising their revenue.

Tackling the challenge of online piracy

In the world of online video piracy, the streaming of live events is increasingly becoming among the most difficult challenges. Where once streaming was low resolution and delivered through websites that were rife with malware and advertising, these websites now offer a better user experience – high-definition resolution on multiple screens and multiple devices and with a broad range of options.

This demand for premium content, in every language and into every market, has led to a surge in the supply of pirate services offering a high-quality user interface, where the video quality can rival that of the Pay TV platforms themselves. By using FMTS’ technology, Cisco’s SPP service is able to detect when there is illegal re-distribution of content from a client’s set top box on the internet and terminates the pirates account.

Thanks to FMTS and our piracy monitoring capabilities that feed the Cisco SPP service with real-time pirated video feeds found on the open internet, the FMTS/Cisco partnership is truly putting two technologies to work together, to take a huge step in the war on online pirates.

Find out more about the Broadcast iD solution from Friend MTS.