Did you know 51% of sports fans watch pirate content at least once a month? And that’s just the armchair pirates during the regular season. What about highly anticipated prize fights, championship games or international tournaments? That’s when the more sophisticated pirates take over.
As a league, rightsholder or broadcaster of premium live sporting events, the pressure is on to protect your content. With live sports, you only get one shot to maximize revenue with as many legitimate viewers as possible. Like a goalie during a shoot-out: when it comes to blocking pirates you have to anticipate all the angles and that’s where advanced geo-fencing technology comes in.
According to a recent report by the Streaming Video Association, “Poorly implemented restrictions allow consumers to access content outside the permitted territories for free and/or at a reduced price than the licensed distributor price (e.g., a boxing match in Ireland costs $25 vs. $80 for the same match in the US).”
Spoof-Proof Your Premium Content by Covering All the Angles
The lazy pirate will circumvent territorial restrictions by using a VPN to mask their actual IP address and spoof their true location. You can easily stop this type of geo-piracy with GeoGuard’s Database solution. Our “Hollywood Studio Approved” VPN and DNS proxy detection solution has been third-party tested and found to be 99.6% effective against the industry’s most popular VPNs. It’s already being used by broadcasters and premier OTT providers globally and integrated with world-leading CDNs including Akamai and Amazon AWS.
But as the sporting (and revenue) stakes get higher, the pirates get more sophisticated in their anonymizing tools and techniques. To secure big-ticket events, you may need to outsmart these fraudsters by fortifying your geofencing system with multiple location verification sources such as Wi-Fi, GPS, cellular and HTML5 data. Fortunately, GeoGuard’s advanced location verification technology can do just that.
Our core geolocation and fraud detection solutions were originally developed for the highly regulated and exacting U.S. iGaming market and sports betting market, where ensuring the true location of a player is critical to complying with state and federal laws.
However, this technology is highly adaptable and configurable in order to meet the specific needs of the streaming video industry to combat the ongoing and evolving geo-piracy threat. So the next time you’re up against some topline geo-pirates trying to score from your big game, make it a shut-out by implementing an extra layer of protection that multi-source geolocation technology can provide.
To learn more about GeoGuard and how we can help secure your next big-ticket event, contact us at solutions@geocomply.com.