How Do You Fight Streaming Piracy in a Free Content Culture?

Learn more about streaming piracy and content protection at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete presentation at Streaming Media East, B204. Batten Down the Hatches: Stream Piracy and How to Protect Your Content, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Christopher Sass: Imagine you go to a millennial or someone like that and say, "Hey, let's go out to Walmart." And we're in Walmart, we walk by, and there's a DVD there or a Blu-ray or some piece of content you really wanna watch. And it's there and it's got a price tag on it and I asked him, "Would you take that DVD and stick it in your pocket and walk out of the store?" And unanimously, there was a cord-cutter study that just came back and they said, "No, of course not. We wouldn't do that. That's wrong, that's stealing."

But then we hop in our car and we drive back to the house and we turn on the TV and then, we go stream that exact same movie that I wouldn't walk out of the store with. And we say, "Well, is that stealing?" Because the media is just different, right? It came streaming in or I had it on media. And the perception is that there's a whole generation of folks that don't see that as stealing. I think over 53% of people on a couple studies I read and it consistently runs in the 50% range, don't consider that wrong.

And that's a problem, right? So if you think about that and think about the mentality, if you grew up with free content, you grew up with getting things on the internet, you grew up with apps where I gave you a little bit of my personal information, I get everything free, or I went to torrent sites and I went out there and I pulled down any of the content I want, that's the culture that we have today and folks just expect things for free. And not necessarily free with an ad tech model where I'm getting advertisement supporting it. I'm just gonna go stream the video I want and go get it.

So I think the ethics need to be and the education needs to be, "Is it wrong and is it there, right?" And you can't legislate it. We tried that in the music industry, right? The music industry said, "Hey, you know what? This whole Napster thing isn't gonna work for us, so let's go out and go after those people and go make examples of them."

And in fact, there was a really interesting article this morning, where it came out and said, NBA and Ultimate Fighting and all that, they were getting together, and they were gonna try to legislate and make this a felony as opposed to a misdemeanor, streaming video. And I don't know that's the right answer, but I think, culturally, people just don't understand or don't care that that's wrong and I think that norm is pervasive across multiple continents and multiple folks.