GeoComply hires Clark to lead global sales
March 30, 2021
GeoComply Solutions, a geolocation security company that helps detect and prevent fraud, has announced that its OTT business has more than doubled in both customers and revenues in 2020. As the pandemic continues to keep people away from theaters and sports arenas, many are turning to VPNs and DNS proxies to circumvent the territorial restrictions on content that studios, sports leagues and other content producers rely on for their revenue. This has driven increased demand for GeoComply’s award-winning VPN and proxy detection solutions, as rights holders and OTT broadcasters look to protect their content from geo-piracy.
Building on a customer base that includes Amazon Prime, BBC and ITV, GeoComply is now ramping up for further strong growth in 2021 by boosting its sales and marketing efforts, particularly with national broadcasters. This includes the appointment of James Clark as Director of Global Sales. James brings over a decade’s experience in content security and was most recently director of the global security business development at Synamedia. Prior to that, James was VP of the content protection and anti-piracy team at Cartesian.
This appointment follows the news that GeoComply has agreed its first institutional capital with investments from Blackstone Growth and Atairos, an independent investment firm backed by Comcast.
“Content piracy via VPNs and proxies has very real consequences for the entire video streaming ecosystem, including significant job losses and slashed production budgets,” says James Clark, Director of Global Sales at GeoComply. “With studios, sports leagues, broadcasters and other rights holders under serious financial pressure because of the pandemic, combating piracy has fast become a top priority. Fortunately, GeoComply’s solution to stop geolocation fraud and geo-piracy is affordable, easy to implement and provides an almost immediate return on investment.”
GeoComply’s Hollywood Studio approved solution for VPN and DNS Proxy detection, GeoGuard, protects billions of dollars of premium video content and is used by global streaming video providers of all sizes, blocking over 100,000 unique fraudulent streaming viewers each month.
According to GlobalWebIndex, VPNs are used regularly by 31% of online users and accessing better entertainment content is important to 22% of VPN users. This might be because content is only available to view in certain countries or because it is cheaper elsewhere.
There are a number of deployment options available for GeoGuard, from a direct API integration with a streaming video platform to simply turning on VPN and proxy detection via a content delivery network (CDN), including Akamai and AWS CloudFront. GeoGuard is independently rated by Kingsmead Security as 99.6% effective in detecting VPNs and DNS proxies.