With Euro 2024, Copa América, Wimbledon, the Summer Olympics and now the English Premier League kicking off, an action-packed summer with its thrilling lineup of events has sports fans worldwide buzzing.
Big-ticket events like these attract larger-than-usual audience viewership, but beneath the excitement lurks a growing threat: artificial intelligence-powered piracy.
From sports organizations to broadcasters and streaming services, AI’s game-changing entrance into the sports piracy arena complicates already difficult efforts to protect valuable content in the digital age.
AI is expected to make it even easier for pirates to distribute unauthorized content, contributing to a piracy industry that, according to recent research, already exceeds $65 billion. But there is hope: AI could also become a powerful ally to combat the piracy threat, enabling defenders to fight fire with AI-enabled fire.
The changing face of sports piracy
Sports piracy involves methods like unauthorized broadcasts, streaming links or websites without proper licensing or authorization.
While it is typical to put the onus on the content owners to identify pirated copies of their content and ask sites or service providers to take it down “expeditiously,” live action — unpredictable and immediate — makes protecting sports content speedily and efficiently difficult. The addition of AI has only added an extra degree of challenge.
Content pirates are sophisticated operators that leverage advanced technologies to line their pockets, and AI is becoming a game changer.
While pirates have long used marketing and advertising to attract subscribers, AI dramatically amplifies their capabilities.
Today, AI-powered content creation systems can generate professional-grade marketing materials, personalized advertisements and even realistic sports commentary at a scale and speed previously unimaginable.
AI enables pirates to craft compelling, targeted campaigns that rival legitimate services in quality and appeal, analyze user data to tailor promotions, create convincing fake reviews and more.
Essentially, AI has supercharged pirates’ ability to use stolen content to market their illegal services, creating a more formidable challenge for rights holders and law enforcement alike.
Unfortunately, these tactics look legitimate to the untrained eye, giving consumers the confidence that they are subscribing to an official service offering. Once signed up as subscribers to the pirate service, these people are then susceptible to the ramifications that typically come from a pirate service, including content quality issues and opening themselves to malware and data breach attacks.
Beyond marketing, AI technologies have the potential to enable hackers of varying skill levels to intensify their hacking activities, stealing live content and disrupting revenue streams. AI-driven piracy could automate content scraping, optimize illegal streams for quality and stability and even create more sophisticated and harder-to-detect illegal distribution networks.
AI now has even the potential to remove ads or branding in real time, giving pirated content a much higher value. Pirates could also use the technology to upscale content produced before HD, making it much more watchable (and higher quality than the repeats on broadcast). Finally, AI-enhanced transcoding can further reduce file sizes for the same quality content, streamlining pirated content distribution. In short, AI is a real game changer in sports piracy.
The negative impact on the sports industry
The consequences of AI-powered piracy extend far beyond lost revenue. This growing threat reaches the entire ecosystem of sports broadcasting.
Rights holders and broadcasters invest billions in sports content. Piracy erodes this investment, potentially leading to reduced funding for future events and athlete development and significant financial losses for all involved.
In an era where viewing consists of a fragmented landscape of streaming offers, legitimate services may struggle to compete with “too-good-to-be-true” pirate offerings, which inevitably drives eager sports fans toward illegal options. While piracy can ultimately harm the reputation of sports leagues and broadcasters, more nefarious services might also unexpectedly collect user data and expose fans to potential fraud or identity theft.
The stakes remain high, and the challenges grow increasingly complex as bad actors harness the power of advancing technologies. However, the sports and media entertainment industry is not defenseless against these developing threats and can team with companies with the right playbook to mount a formidable defense against AI-powered piracy.
Core elements of a strategy to defend against AI-powered piracy
Despite AI-enhanced pirate capabilities, the technology also equips defenders to better protect valuable live content. Because when it comes to AI, fighting fire with fire is an effective strategy. From identifying pirate sites and finding illicitly shared content to pirate service disruption and countermeasures, AI is a powerful tool in the analysis, quantification and remediation process in the fight against piracy.
That said, combatting evolving piracy threats involves a multifaceted approach, which — while including AI-powered solutions where it makes sense — combines technological innovation, industry collaboration and consumer engagement to safeguard the future of sports broadcasting.
In today’s current environment, content owners and broadcasters should consider the following:
Advanced content protection. Sometimes, the best defense is a good — or, in this case, proactive — offense, including implementing robust digital rights management systems and watermarking technologies. For example, NexGuard Forensic Watermarking — part of the NAGRA Active Streaming Protection framework — helps identify the source of leaked content, enabling swift action against offenders.
Continuous monitoring. Collecting intelligence and spotting early patterns is the first step to stemming the piracy problem. Modern threat intelligence services crawl the internet 24/7, 365 days a year, using AI to help discover and analyze storefronts that propose pirate services and show details regarding content offerings.
Threat environment exploration. With intelligence in hand, the next step in a comprehensive antipiracy strategy efficiently targets investigation efforts to identify enforcement actions. By automatically gathering, correlating and processing data from many data sources, advanced AI tools can detect repetitive patterns and create graphical representations of pirate ecosystems, visually exposing critical actors and infrastructure.
Consumer education and accessibility. It’s key to make it easy for fans to access legitimate content, simplifying the process of finding and subscribing to official broadcasts and educating them about the risks of using pirate services, including potential malware, poor quality and the economic impact on their favorite sports or teams.
Decisive action. With targets identified and validated, the final stage involves investing in and putting effort into tracking, documenting and acting against bad actors profiting from live sports content. While some operators have dedicated in-house teams to enforce antipiracy strategies, other antipiracy service providers can deliver actionable investigation reports, help streamline legal action or engage directly with law enforcement on your organization’s behalf.
Protecting the 2024 summer of sports and beyond
Clearly, the fight against AI-powered sports piracy demands a multifaceted and dynamic playbook with different tactics. While these strategies provide a robust framework for protection, the landscape of digital piracy constantly evolves.
Consequently, the long-term key to success demands continually updating the playbook to remain one step ahead of adversaries.
As AI continues to evolve, so will the methods that pirates use. The sports and media and entertainment industries must play a game of strategy, endurance and teamwork to score big wins in the battle against sports piracy. Combining technological solutions with consumer education and industry collaboration empowers us to mount a full-court press against those stealing the thrill of the game from legitimate providers.
This high-stakes game isn’t just about protecting the bottom line but truly preserving the integrity of the games we love and ensuring a level playing field.
To learn more about how NAGRA is leveraging AI in anti-piracy and other areas, please reach out to us to continue the conversation or come see us at IBC 2024 from Sept. 13-16 in Booth 1.C81.
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Tim Pearson. Vice President – Global Solution & Partner Marketing, NAGRA