Is Content Piracy Inevitable?

Our report “Video Streaming Services: Is Content Leakage an Inevitable Fate?” discusses the widespread misconceptions about the effort required to prevent content piracy and the many solutions that have significant potential for improving the security of online streaming platforms and making these attacks either impossible or significantly more difficult to execute.

In 2018, a pivotal shift occurred in media consumption as the global number of video streaming subscribers surpassed that of pay TV subscribers. However, this growth has been overshadowed by the rise of digital piracy, posing a significant threat to the business of legal streaming services. According to Dataprot.net, the annual global revenue loss in the movie industry due to digital piracy is estimated between $40 and $97 billion.

Moreover, online piracy of audiovisual content continues to escalate year over year, facilitated by the internet, which is making it increasingly effortless to find high-quality pirated content on professional-looking illegal services.

But is piracy of video streaming services an inevitable fate that no technical solution is capable of efficiently preventing? Or is piracy always the consequence of weaknesses in implementations that could have been avoided thanks to better thought-out designs and moderate extra effort?