Video: Early Window Anti-Piracy Case Study, Pt. 1: Strategy
Learn more about anti-piracy strategy and technology at Streaming Media's next event.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Ron Wheeler: This is a case study that involves South Korea. UHD and HDR are the most attractive pirate sources. They are that's what every pirate wants to send to his customers, whether they're paid or ad-supported.
At Fox, as content owners, our goal is to actually make money off of this high-quality content and early-window content, but without stimulating additional piracy when we make it available. The way we do that is forensic watermarking, and related measures like geo-location.
The four elements are a distributive mark that we put on in our mastering and distribution infrastructure to identify the various people that we send the content to so that we can quickly see where when we have a leak, where did it come from?
In this case, we were successful in persuading our distributors to include a warning card to the users. Of course, the main purpose of this is deterrence rather than punishment. We want to prevent people from stealing the content in the first place. And then the few bad apples that steal it anyway--we go after them.
The key element here is the session-based watermark on each transmission to the end user.
In this case study, we’re looking at VOD content. Each VOD purchaser or renter of the content is given a unique code. We create the technology to do that and then of course the punishment of the few bad apples is the last piece.
I've already talked about a lot of points on this slide. The interesting thing about this case study is it's actually 4 1/2 years now. Oour first release was early 2014. We've had 35 data points to point to in this case. In South Korea, we've been able to create an ecosystem for early releases. It's the first release anywhere in the world for us and for our fellow studios who are engaged in this. As I said almost everyone else's is participating. It's called SP-VOD.
Then so we've tried to prevent this from being a worldwide source of piracy for everywhere for both for Korea and outside Korea. Again, this is another representation that's specific to Korea--the session-based watermark I've talked about already. This pre-roll warning card says are you aware--do you know that you can be punished for illegal copying and distribution?
The key point for us: The individual who copies or distributes this video without authorization can be identified and verified through a technological tracking system and can be held liable for money damages or punished according to related laws. That's a reference to criminal. So that's the warning card we're really happy about, because it's as important as the technology, as far as we’re concerned. And then, because it's a foreign language and a subtitle country, we use burned-in created subtitles to make the content less valuable outside of Korea.
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