Interview with Verimatrix’s Maria Malinkowitsch on the evolving fight against content theft.
Broadband TV News spoke with Maria Malinkowitsch, Director Product Management at global content protection solutions provider Verimatrix, about the rapid rise of large-scale illegal streaming operations, the growing risks created by unmanaged devices and illicit CDN access – and what operators can realistically do to protect their platforms.
BTN: What are the main piracy challenges today, particularly in streaming and live sports?
Malinkowitsch: Piracy is unfortunately rising. Torrents may have dropped by over 40%, but they’ve been replaced by far more malicious forms of content theft. We’re seeing huge financial losses: France’s Ligue 1 recently revealed almost €400 million in lost revenue — nearly the entire value of the rights — and LaLiga estimates €600-700 million lost per year. These are numbers that can break the industry.
“Piracy-as-a-service” has industrialised illegal streaming
BTN: Why is piracy growing so quickly? Is it easier for criminals?
Malinkowitsch: Massively. In the past, breaking a set-top box or smartcard-based encryption system took years and required professional hackers. Today, content is delivered to millions of unmanaged devices – web browsers, connected TV sets, smartphones, tablets – which are easy to exploit. Worse, on the dark web you can now buy piracy-as-a-service: a complete illegal OTT platform with UI, recommendation engine, customer management and thousands of channels, including premium live sports. It looks as professional as Netflix or Disney+. You don’t even need to pay for a CDN – it all comes included.
Organised crime and money laundering
BTN: Who is behind these operations?
Malinkowitsch: Most of these illegal IPTV platforms are not run by hobbyists, but by organised criminal networks, and the money flowing into them ultimately fuels activities such as money laundering, human trafficking, child exploitation, weapons and drug trade – the very things consumers would never knowingly support. People think they’re just saving money on football, but the criminal ecosystem in the background is extremely dark.
Consumers also face legal and cyber risks
BTN: What about end users – are they at risk?
Malinkowitsch: Legally, yes – piracy is illegal, even for viewers, although prosecution is rare because legislation lags behind. The bigger danger is cyber-risk: illegal services inject unknown ads and malicious banners, leading to stolen credentials, hacked devices or credit card fraud. People behave as if the web is a candy store – it isn’t. It’s a dangerous environment, and pirate sites exploit that.
Why “reactive” measures no longer work
BTN: How should operators respond?
Malinkowitsch: Most still focus on post-mortem measures: watermarking and sending takedown notices. But 81% of takedown requests are ignored. It’s unrealistic to chase pirates after the fact. Operators must shift to prevention – stopping intruders before content is stolen.
One major threat today is CDN leeching, where pirates misuse stolen access tokens from legitimate apps to pull the original stream and redistribute it at industrial scale. For example, during a major live football match measured by a leading CDN provider in Spain and Italy, more than half of all CDN traffic was illegal. This hits operators twice: it drives up CDN costs precisely at peak times and simultaneously degrades the viewing experience for paying customers, who may face buffering or be unable to access the stream because bandwidth is being consumed by pirate services.
A five-step strategy for real protection
BTN: What does effective prevention look like?
Malinkowitsch: You must bring unmanaged apps back into a trusted environment. A robust anti-piracy strategy includes:
- Managing access, so only legitimate protected apps can fetch the stream.
- Hardening your own app against attacks like tampering, reverse engineering and credential theft.
- Continuous monitoring, so you know instantly when protection is being bypassed.
- Targeted countermeasures – blocking only the compromised device or app, not the whole household, avoiding accidental shutdowns of paying subscribers.
- Polymorphism – frequently changing app protection, so hackers must start from scratch each time.
Without these steps, operators cannot keep pace. Piracy evolves too quickly.
Counteraction must be automated – not manual
BTN: Isn’t this too complex and expensive for smaller platforms?
Malinkowitsch: It doesn’t have to be. Modern solutions automate these steps. Verimatrix’s own Streamkeeper portfolio combines multi-DRM, watermarking, web-crawling, piracy monitoring and app-level countermeasures in one package. Our Counterspy component is designed specifically to identify protected apps, authenticate them and block illegitimate access without harming real subscribers. It gives operators a manageable, proactive defence.
“You can’t eliminate piracy – but you can contain it”
Malinkowitsch: You will never eliminate piracy completely – someone can always film a screen with a smartphone. But you can drastically reduce industrial-scale theft by making it harder, riskier and more expensive. The industry must move from reacting to containing and preventing. That’s the only sustainable strategy.
Maria Malinkowitsch, Director Product Management at Verimatrix, boasts extensive expertise in video distribution and product management.
After over 13 years at SES managing a comprehensive video distribution portfolio, including satellite capacity, encryption, encoding, uplink, and OTT streaming services, Maria joined Verimatrix in 2022 to lead the Antipiracy portfolio. There, she advances secure video delivery worldwide through technologies such as Streamkeeper Watermarking and Counterspy. She is committed to enabling secure video delivery globally, fostering a safer and more accessible digital media experience for all.
