GeoGuard support for anti-piracy advocacy
October 22, 2020
By Colin Mann
Noting that online content piracy has surged during the pandemic, as more people at home are using VPNs and DNS proxies to circumvent territorial restrictions in order to illegally access content, and to help the media industry combat this serious and growing problem, geolocation-based security and digital content protection specialist of GeoGuard has joined the Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA), a community within the Media and Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA).
The MESA is a global association that advances new technologies enabling the digital transformation of media and entertainment (M&E). The CDSA, a community within the MESA, advocates for innovative and responsible delivery and storage of entertainment, software, and information content, and is advised by an Executive Committee encompassing BBC Studios, Disney, Paramount, Amazon Studios, NBCUniversal and further industry experts.
“Online content piracy is one of the biggest problems facing studios, sports leagues and OTT platforms today,” commented Guy Finley, President of MESA. “The entire content ecosystem is built on a territorially-based business model and circumventing these geographical restrictions through the use of location spoofing apps like VPNs, puts revenues at risk. We are excited to have GeoGuard join the CDSA and contribute their significant experience and expertise in content protection to the community.”
During the pandemic, online video streaming has increased dramatically and along with it, the piracy of premium content. VPN providers are exploiting the situation, aggressively marketing their products to promote wide-spread content piracy. With studios, sports leagues, content rightsholders and OTTs under significant economic pressures, this loss of revenue from content piracy is threatening their very existence.
“With both video streaming services and usage on the rise, the protection of content from piracy is of paramount importance for the entire industry,” asserted Artem Lalaiants, Product and Service Delivery Manager at GeoGuard. “Piracy takes many forms, but geo-piracy and geolocation fraud caused by VPNs is one area that can be successfully tackled. It’s essential that studios, rightsholders, sports leagues and OTT broadcasters do everything they can to stop piracy, not only to preserve the value of their content now, but to remain viable businesses in the future.”
GeoGuard’s geolocation fraud detection solutions are used by some of the top streaming video companies, broadcasters and sports leagues worldwide. These solutions are fully integrated into the platforms of several of the world’s largest CDN providers including Akamai and Amazon AWS to protect against geo-piracy and geolocation fraud caused by the use of VPNs and DNS proxies to circumvent geographical restrictions on content.
The use of VPNs and DNS proxies to spoof a user’s location in order to access geographically restricted content is on the rise. Global Web Index survey figures suggest that 37 per cent of all Internet users are using VPNs, mainly to access restricted content.