The world of piracy has changed dramatically from just a few years ago.
As technology has advanced to make our working and social lives easier, it’s also allowed pirates to become more sophisticated. They’re even pirating pirated sites and stealing the branding of more popular sites using subdomains, redirecting traffic much like they do from legitimate sites.
More than that, the profile of the consumer of digital pirated content has changed too. A few years ago, getting your hands on illegal content took a bit of effort. Yes, it was largely peer-to-peer based, uploading and downloading shows, music and movies, but a user had to seek them out, find the right torrent or file and hope the version they downloaded was of decent quality.
Today, with opensource software like KODI (which is in itself legitimate), streaming sticks are being modified with addons and are available “fully loaded” and ready to go. Simply plug it into your smart TV, and you’ve got access to almost anything. It’s an easy, frictionless and lucrative market.
This change in landscape also makes it more difficult for rightsholders and broadcasters to protect content. However, with the right anti-piracy approach, you can use data and analytics to strengthen your efforts. Understanding where and how people are engaging with pirated content helps improve strategies, too. By gathering data, rightsholders and broadcasters can inform their decision making on important issues, such as distribution strategies, launching a new product sooner or reprioritising a go-to-market strategy.
MarkMonitor has these capabilities and uses its technology to gather data about where, when and how people access pirated content across channels, including peer-to-peer file sharing, websites, search engines, user generated content (UGC) sites, live and video streaming, KODI and over-the-top (OTT) sources.
How do we do solve the problem of piracy?
MarkMonitor uses a series of tools to tackle the issue for our customers.
This includes the MarkMonitor Global Digital Piracy Index (GDPI) that generates detailed intelligence of how content is being accessed and consumed online. It creates a factual overview based on the fire sharing landscape and helps access demand for your content.
We also leverage a reporting dashboard, known as Insite, which tracks industry and project KPIs, MarkMonitor Up-link (our piracy intelligence portal) and MarkMonitor Savvy, which is our automated link verification tool.
The data gleaned from these sources can be used to inform many areas of business. You can answer questions around distribution and availability strategies as well as on shortcomings when it comes to global marketing and promotions. Your data can also help with decisions around the monitoring and management of your content catalogue, driving business development and identifying gaps in a global strategy.
Sophisticated threats require a sophisticated response
Rightsholders and broadcasters need to ensure strategies cover all channels being used to share content and need access to data that drives all-important decisions. What’s more, intel needs to be actionable.
For more information on the use of analytics and business intelligence to drive your AntiPiracy strategy, tune in to our Powering Your AntiPiracy Strategy on-demand webinar.