CABLE CONGRESS 2013 – LONDON. Piracy is still a potent revenue threat to pay-TV operators, though at the same time the type of threat is changing.
Providing a presentation entitled The Changing Face of Revenue Security, Steve Oetegenn, CSMO Verimatrix, referred to a study by PWC undertaken in 2011 that showed that in the 18-25 age group 81% of respondents said they were likely to continue using pirate website over the next six months.
What was more, 40% answered affirmatively to piracy via mobile access.
However, looking at another study, undertaken by Farncombe in 2012, Oetegenn said that over 100 operators globally indicated that although their biggest piracy concern was currently control word sharing, in five years time it was likely to be downloaded content redistribution over the internet.
Oetegenn also said that we are moving into the post smart card era and that indeed the most recent two generations of pay-TV video networks (IPTV and OTT) were based entirely on software security.
In addition, we are facing an explosion of media over IP. While today we have 700 million video users accessing on average 10 minutes of video daily and using a total of 2.4 Tbps, in five years the figures are projected to rise to 2.1 billion, 2 hours and 1,296 Tbps respectively.
Alongside this, content security requirements are increasing and there is a need for a unified approach to security.
