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Tag: Deepak Bhatia

  • GUEST COLUMN: How to combat streaming piracy with OTT’s broken protocol?

    GUEST COLUMN: How to combat streaming piracy with OTT’s broken protocol?

    Mumbai: With vast sums of money to be made, it’s not surprising that streaming pirates are continually upping their game to keep their highly profitable illegal businesses afloat.  A recent global study conducted by Ampere Analysis for Synamedia found that sports streaming piracy alone is worth over $28 billion and the Global Innovation Policy Centre places the global TV industry’s losses from digital piracy between $39.3 to $95.4 billion per year.

    From Bollywood and Hollywood blockbusters to LIVE sports including IPL and women’s football, streaming piracy has reached an industrial scale in India. Within minutes of release, stolen content is circulated, exchanged and sold on open internet sites and social media platforms, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, as well as on closed subscription-based pirate networks and dedicated OTT applications. Some illegitimate, subscription-based pirate services are now so good that consumers think they are using the brand’s own service, damaging the brand of the legitimate service and preventing upsell opportunities.

    But with superior intelligence and the appropriate technology and legal procedures in place, the industry can stay one step ahead, protect its revenue streams and stop criminals siphoning off billions in revenue that rightfully belong to content owners and services providers.

    Pirate profiteers raise the stakes

    Although low quality pirate content filmed surreptitiously in cinemas is still available, as more consumers switch to digital platforms, pirates are using increasingly sophisticated ways to steal content – and deliver it in pristine quality.

    And the pirates’ methods have advanced considerably since they simply exploited “the analogue hole”: in other words, stole content from the HDMI ports of Set Top Boxes. As license owners and operators have increased their protection methods, cracking down with a combination of source-detection and disruption technologies as well as legal action, pirates have been hunting for new and more concealed ways to source content and find the weak link in the chain.

    From Digital Rights Management (DRM) hacking as seen recently with Widevine, to bypassing client watermarking and manipulating legitimate OTT applications, today’s streaming pirates have found ways to steal not just high-quality content but entire OTT services, including redistributing directly from the service provider’s content delivery network (CDN).

    Sourcing, aggregating and distributing content

    A quick Google search will quickly take you into a world of organised crime: industrial scale professional hackers, criminal technology experts with content aggregators, content wholesalers and content resellers conducting the biggest criminal heist the world has ever seen.

    Current anti-piracy approaches – such as DRM, client hardening and concurrency restrictions are simply scratching the surface of OTT piracy and pirates continue to profit.

    Using the intelligence provided by our operational security team and with access to pirates’ scripts, we have unearthed the root source of this problem – the OTT protocol is broken. The technology of OTT delivery makes it simple and cheap to set up as a pirate operator. Pirates don’t necessarily need to break the DRM to steal content. Using pirate servers and clients, pirates are hacking the OTT protocol to get the DRM license and redirect pirate clients to legitimate service and content providers’ CDNs.

    With little to no acquisition or content costs, pirates have become ultimate media super-aggregators. They can bring highly-sought after content together at an unbeatable price with no geo restrictions or competition law challenges – and then redistribute the stolen content to their paying customers at the expense of the video service provider by using their infrastructure undetected. 

    Protecting content across the ecosystem

    With an understanding about the methods used and insight into how pirates operate, Synamedia has developed the industry’s first solution to systemically address the inherent weaknesses that make it easy for pirates to not only steal content but also entire OTT services, including gaining access to the service provider’s CDN.

    Synamedia OTT ServiceGuard makes it possible to securely distribute content on open platforms by validating that only legitimate subscribers and applications are granted authorised access and receive content. It gives each client a unique identity that is not cloneable and allocates secure keys for signing service requests, ensuring all client messages are validated for their authenticity and origin. This has a critical role to play in protecting content, but tackling piracy requires an all-round team approach, blending pre-breach approaches with proactive detection and disruption technologies and solutions.

    Synamedia’s unrivalled intelligence-based model leverages AI technologies alongside human intelligence – including undercover investigators and cyber security, psychology, criminology, and sociology experts – to monitor and map the piracy supply chain, detect, deter and disrupt piracy and orchestrate anti-piracy activities and legal and technical takedowns.

    The financial rewards on offer and the ease of set-up – combined with the low risk of arrest or meaningful punishment – means the problem of piracy will not go away.  But, by making life as difficult as possible for both pirates and viewers of illicit streams and making legal subscriptions more attractive, content owners and rights holders can not only protect their content investments, but video service providers can cut infrastructure costs and create the opportunity to capture new subscribers.

    (Deepak Bhatia is general manager and head of sales, India at Synamedia. The views expressed in this column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them)

     

  • GUEST COLUMN: Are you ready to find new revenues with addressable advertising?

    GUEST COLUMN: Are you ready to find new revenues with addressable advertising?

    Mumbai: A new golden age of TV advertising is emerging thanks to technology breakthroughs in addressable advertising. In the same way that the internet opened up advertising to small businesses, now the days of ‘spray and pray’ are over. Anyone wanting to reach a specific audience through TV and video services can do so.

    Video service providers stand to gain with a new revenue stream now that advertisers can reach their target audience with absolute precision. Solutions such as Synamedia Iris can be used to create advertising propositions that reach specific TV audience segments of any size and makeup across all services, devices and screens.

    TV and OTT providers have a brand and audience reach that online alternatives can only dream of. Combining that reach with the data richness of online advertising means not just keeping pace with online advertising but offering something better.

    Opening the door to new advertisers

    The opportunity for addressable advertising is huge. Synamedia collaborated with Sky, the leading pay-TV platform in the UK, on the development of the pioneering AdSmart platform eight years ago. The results after deploying AdSmart were impressive. Sky found that addressable advertising can boost ad engagement by 35 per cent and cut channel switching in half. Other benefits at Sky included an influx of 70 per cent new advertisers who’d previously not advertised on TV or Sky; a Ford dealership that saw a 100 per cent rise in sales following a single campaign; and Audi found its addressable audiences twice as likely to buy as generic viewers.

    This matters because video service providers are under pressure from shareholders to create new revenues, and reverse the flow of advertising to Google, Facebook and other online giants.

    Another benefit is increased revenue from reduced waste. Up to now, ad space is booked upfront and any inventory that hasn’t been sold ahead of time is considered waste. But with addressable advertising, every slot can be filled on demand using a real time digital trading model. While this requires a change of cultural mindset across the advertising ecosystem, it presents new opportunities.

    New industry collaborations

    While a number of video service providers are already experimenting with addressable advertising, including Synamedia Iris, maximising this opportunity requires a new model of collaboration in the industry. Broadcasters and pay-TV operators need to develop a solid, symbiotic business case that makes operators willing to share their audience data and broadcasters willing to share ad revenues.

    Operators hold the balance of power with their reams of data about audiences and viewer behaviour – the key to addressability. And there is an incentive to trade data with broadcasters for a share of pay-TV addressable advertising revenues.

    Data and ad revenue sharing is already underway on VOD platforms, and now this needs to be extended to linear TV and hybrid services. The good news is that the tide has already started to turn as pay-TV operators and broadcasters rethink how this revenue-sharing will ensure their long-term viability.

    Once the technology is in place, the easiest way for operators to get started is to work with those broadcasters who have both linear TV and OTT services because they are best placed to start selling addressable advertising slots alongside their traditional TV advertising space. By collaborating, operators and broadcasters can aggregate their advertising inventories and increase the size of addressable audiences, thereby creating a compelling proposition for big brands.

    The benefit for operators and broadcasters is that these advertising slots with larger addressable audiences will command higher CPMs (Cost Per 1000 impressions).

    Moving from quantity to quality

    All the addressability in the world won’t translate into revenues unless it’s possible to provide accurate measurements that allow advertisers to validate ad impressions and improve future marketing campaigns. To achieve this and compete against big tech’s muscle in online advertising and analytics, real-time campaign measurement is key.

    Addressable advertising’s model depends on audience quality rather than the audience volumes that are associated with traditional channel-based TV advertising. To measure and analyse in this new way, operators can use new analytics technologies to demonstrate the value of slots and audience engagement and determine a campaign’s impact and ROI.

    For example, if viewers are fast-forwarding or channel-hopping during ads, this indicates a need to further refine viewer profiles or optimise the placement of ad breaks. After all, a few well-timed ad breaks are infinitely better than several ill-thought-out ones.

    Unify

    One requirement is a unified approach to campaign management, with a single interface to manage multiple campaigns across multiple devices and platforms. Such tools also have the openness and flexibility to support third party services, evolving business models and ecosystems.

    Having a unified, insight-driven solution that helps manage inventory, assets, planning, and segments, will ultimately enable video service providers to deliver a better, less disruptive experience for their audience. And advertisers will be able to run more efficient, successful campaigns. An end-to-end solution, Synamedia Iris removes the friction points that characterise traditional piecemeal addressable advertising products. A single platform, Iris supports unified campaign management, delivery, and measurement to multiple screens across apps and live, linear and catch- up services.

    Now, big brands and new advertisers alike can reach their target audiences cost effectively without wasting impressions; advertising revenues are increased consistently across all services, devices and screens; and consumers can enjoy a more relevant viewing experience. Welcome to the world of addressable advertising.

    (Deepak Bhatia is director, sales & general manager for Synamedia India. The views expressed in the column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)

  • Guest Column: Combatting sophisticated streaming piracy, from the dark web to Lazada

    Guest Column: Combatting sophisticated streaming piracy, from the dark web to Lazada

    GURUGRAM: Synamedia’s piracy investigators have verified a disturbing trend in India and South East Asia. Research both on the dark web and open internet by the company’s anti-piracy experts shows that illegal streaming of over-the-top (OTT) services using stolen subscriber credentials is now well established, with both local and international OTT video services being targeted.  And the growing popularity of premium streaming services, such as those of live sports, makes this an increasingly lucrative business for pirates.

    Fortunately, there are a number of ways that legitimate OTT providers can combat content theft without impacting genuine subscribers.

    Hacking tools are rife on the dark web

    Synamedia’s expert team found that pirates are using the dark web and Telegram to exchange and sell software that allow OTT accounts to be hacked, as well as selling subscribers’ stolen credentials to each other. Both generic credential cracking tools and configuration files tailored to specific OTT platform offerings are available.

    Investigation also revealed that dealers are selling thousands of illegally obtained credentials for the most popular Indian OTT platforms in bulk, on closed e-commerce sites popular with pirates.

    Pirates can also buy leaked credentials that have been taken from well-publicised, large-scale account breaches such as those suffered by major airlines, content providers and hotel chains. The re-use of these credentials for OTT piracy relies on poor security awareness, where people use the same username and password across multiple accounts, even after data breaches have been made public.

    Validated login credentials may then be sold in bulk to other dealers or offered free of charge to pirates to establish credibility. For example, we found that thousands of one South East Asian OTT platform’s credentials were being sold in bulk for approximately $1 per credential.

    Pirates are posing as legitimate businesses

    Pirates are increasingly posing as legitimate businesses as their levels of sophistication increase. Blatant examples of pirates selling illegal subscriptions to consumers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp are rife. Pirates are also posing as legitimate platforms on popular Asian e-commerce sites such as Lazada, Shopee and my24hrshop.com, where some even use the real OTT providers’ logos and branding to confuse consumers.  

    These pirates are typically charging consumers between a half to one fifth of legitimate subscription fees, with premium services that include live sports packages and new movies attracting the highest rates.

    They are also offering a wide range of payment options including bank transfer, credit card and online payment. Dealers on some platforms accept PayPal and crypto-currency payments to hide their identities.

    Some credentials are being used to feed long-established illegal re-distribution from piracy networks. In this case, the pirate operator typically takes out legitimate OTT subscriptions, and takes advantage of credentials sharing to repackage and offer this content for sale as an illicit subscription service.

    Combatting streaming piracy

    These illegal streaming services compete head-on with legitimate OTT services, stealing revenues and devaluing content. There is an urgent need to disrupt these pirates’ ecosystems with a more forensic, inference-based approach designed to help drive up legitimate revenues and reduce consumers’ reliance on illegal streams.

    Legitimate providers don’t just have to contend with the lower subscription fees charged by pirate services. Pirate operators also often offer a greater choice of channels, more flexible packaging options, and contract free subscriptions – things that many consumers find more convenient, even if morally they know it is wrong.

    This point was discussed in a research report on global sports piracy recently published by Synamedia. The report concluded that an important element in the fight-back is for legitimate streaming providers to adopt more flexible solutions and services that offer sports fans more appealing themes, mixes of access and payment models. This would make it easier for sports fans to choose legitimate services over pirate streams.

    Adopting technologies and approaches that can demonstrably move the anti-piracy needle are vital. For example, Synamedia’s new intelligence-first security model makes it possible to measure the efficacy and Return on Investment of anti-piracy initiatives. Using these advanced technologies, solutions and services that draw on a blend of human and digital intelligence, a detailed picture can be built of the pirate ecosystem, crack the criminal mind-set and – working closely with law enforcement agencies – ultimately shut down pirates’ businesses. This hard data can help Synamedia customers not only protect revenues, but also negotiate fair content licence terms such as sports rights and ensure compliance.

    With streaming piracy an increasingly existential threat to the industry, there is no time to lose.

    The writer is head of sales – India at Synamedia. The opinions expressed here are his own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.

  • Guest Column: Streamline Set-top-box, CAS specifications and save subscribers hundreds of crores

    Guest Column: Streamline Set-top-box, CAS specifications and save subscribers hundreds of crores

    Broadcast pay-TV in India is based on globally developed standards that enabled the fast and affordable deployment of innovative services, and intense competition. During the Covid2019 crisis, broadcast pay-TV cable and DTH platforms continued to provide consistent quality of service to all subscribers.

    In contrast, over-the-top (OTT) video streaming services required concerted interventions by broadcasters and mobile network operators to reduce video quality, bitrates, and reduce congestion. While Indian regulation of OTT video services has been very light touch, Indian broadcast pay-TV regulation has grown in complexity and cost since DTH services began in 2003. Not only are DTH and cable operators expected to divert time and resources into jumping through ever more convoluted regulatory hoops, but these additional costs would ultimately be borne by subscribers.

    Beyond India, the costs of over-regulation in various sectors have increasingly been recognised and challenged. In India, the rise of broadband internet penetration has provided direct access to new, large, well-funded foreign and local OTT players that are lightly regulated. The result is increased competition, which better serves subscribers and viewers than over-regulation.

    Read more news on TRAI

    Particularly effective measures taken elsewhere to reduce regulatory burdens have been to mandate:

    overall cost-benefit analysis for justification of all new regulations and changes, and

    sunset dates before which all regulations must be reviewed to ensure they are still justified, otherwise they automatically expire.

    Indian regulators would do well to adopt similar measures, both in policy and in practice, and save Indian subscribers hundreds of crores. The capex alone spent to support existing interoperability measures on DTH STBs have exceeded Rs 600 crore.

    TRAI’s bundling and pricing controls on content – both distribution and retail – have been widely critiqued. Also pernicious are its technology regulations – most recently its recommendations on set-top-box interoperability measures (10 April 2020) and mooted changes to the technical compliance framework for Conditional Access Systems (CAS) and Subscriber Management Systems (SMS) (Consultation Paper of 22 April 2020). Both are rooted in decades-old competition concerns, predating the internet age and massive advances in basic and digital literacy.

    The set-top-box (STB) regulations in particular fail to recognise that pay-TV operators are not in the business of providing devices, but of services. To the extent they are not prevented by regulation, broadcast pay-TV operators differentiate their service offerings with unique combinations of content

    and user experience, also VAS, and customer support.

    Read our coverage on set-top boxes

    The level of “interoperability” TRAI’s measures would enable – video and audio from one pay-TV platform to be able to be seen and heard via an STB owned by a competitor – were questionable in 2003, when STBs were relatively costly compared to dishes and installation, and the content and user experiences almost unknown without a service subscription. 

    In 2020, almost anyone can preview videos on the pay-TV providers’ websites, via search engines, or online review sites and make well-informed choices. Pay-TV operators must meet a plethora of regulated quality of service criteria in addition to bundling and pricing criteria. And for those who remain too cautious to commit, STB rental is available from all pay-TV operators.

    Unfortunately, TRAI has not performed a cost-benefit analysis on STB interoperability recently, if at all. Costs of interoperability to be borne by all subscribers are quantifiable in terms of capex and opex for each pay-TV operator platform and delays to other road-mapped innovations, which could bring greater benefit to more subscribers. If there is any benefit of TRAI’s recommended interoperability measures, it has never been quantified, nor even systematically estimated, at least not publicly. The capex alone spent to support existing interoperability measures on DTH STBs has exceeded Rs 600 crores, just for the common interface sockets. The benefit to subscribers and viewers has been zero for this white elephant, that all have paid for and none have benefited from. And at the end-of-life, the extra plastic and metal from these STBs are destined for reprocessing or landfill.

    The choice of USB port-based interoperability makes the TRAI recommendation appear simple. The simplicity of “plug and play” devices to the user hides huge amounts of standardisation and pre-integration work between USB hosts (STBs) and clients (USB dongles). Content and revenue security and subscriber privacy requirements, plus a history of USB malware exploits targeting embedded systems, make for a large development overhead to support TRAI’s recommended measures without compromising security.

    India-unique security requirements also need India-specific standardisation and pre-integration. Costs will again be borne by all existing and future Indian broadcast pay-TV subscribers, for no obvious benefit to any. The existing technical compliance framework for CAS and SMS was meant to ensure minimum content security performance, functionality, and features across platforms and maximum real choice for subscribers, as more content would be made available to each platform complying with this framework.

    Although it has not entirely met its objectives, specific incremental changes to the existing framework are preferable to establishing a new framework. Increased auditing capability is needed – especially more technical expertise – to minimise delays and reduce the number of spurious compliances reported. There is also the need to augment, revise and tighten the security parameters within the framework in line with global developments, to schedule future periodic revisions, and to provide a mechanism for urgent out-of-schedule revisions to address exceptional situations. But there is no need to constitute a brand-new framework from scratch.

    In summary, TRAI’s recently recommended set-top-box interoperability measures and mooted changes to the technical compliance framework for CAS and SMS threaten to disrupt a sector facing increasing external competition from lightly regulated OTT video and fierce internal competition. Costly, resource-diverting, and time-consuming changes to broadcast pay-TV now, due to redundant early 2000’s concerns, should be avoided. In regulating the most dependable, differentiated, and diversely available pay-TV services, take great care, and first, do no harm!

    For further details, please refer to Synamedia’s responses to the relevant TRAI consultations:

    https://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Synamedia_19122019.pdf and here:

    https://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Synamedia_04062020.pdf.

    (The author is Synamedia India Sales head Deepak Bhatia. The views are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)

  • Synamedia ropes in Deepak Bhatia as general manager, India

    Synamedia ropes in Deepak Bhatia as general manager, India

    KOLKATA:  Synamedia today announced that it has appointed Deepak Bhatia as general manager and head of sales, India. Bhatia will drive Synamedia’s business in India with responsibility for the company’s sales and pre-sales teams.

     Bhatia joins Synamedia following 13 years at Technicolor, most recently as vice president and business head of sales in South Asia with responsibility for sales, marketing and operations. Prior to this, Deepak worked at Bharti Enterprises for over ten years as general manager of business development overseeing the business development and supply chain functions. He graduated in electronics and telecommunications from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal.

     “The video landscape is rapidly changing in India, with global OTT players and well-established local OTT platforms launching new disruptive technologies and setting world records for streaming services.  Synamedia, with its long history in India, next-generation technologies and cloud-based platform underpinned by the world’s most advanced security solutions, is uniquely positioned to help operators thrive in this new era,” said Bhatia.

     “As an accomplished professional with tremendous experience in the pay-TV and broadcast sector, Deepak’s appointment will help drive Synamedia’s India business. India is a strategically important market for Synamedia and Deepak’s appointment will help us to further strengthen our long-term partnerships with key customers looking to transform their businesses and win in today’s fast-changing market,” Synamedia APAC and Latin America executive vice president and general manager Sue Couto said.

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