Boosting revenues and preventing waste is a priority in any business, but these goals become a bit more challenging when your product can be stolen and resold on a global scale. This is the case with content theft, and sports streams are among the most frequently pirated.

Content owners need an array of protections in place to keep at least a semblance of control over their content. Digital rights management (DRM) is a cornerstone of these protections. In principle, DRM is the technology that ensures that only those who are properly authorised can access content. In practice, it works as one element in a chain of technologies that form multiple protections against piracy, or can create multiple vulnerabilities.

“DRM remains fit for purpose, but only as part of a layered strategy, not as a standalone solution,” says Jason Dvorkin, Amazon Media & Entertainment’s AMER leader for industry specialist business development. “DRM fits into the content protection toolkit as an essential but complex component that requires strategic decision-making. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.”

The original source of pirated content is often a legitimate account, a user accessing a stream through proper, DRM-protected protocols, then republishing it.

“Modern content protection requires DRM at its core, but supplemented by fraud detection, token authentication, CDN monitoring and forensic watermarking,” says Dvorkin “There’s no ‘better way’ that replaces DRM, but the effectiveness comes from intelligently combining tools based on content value and risk.”

No excuse for no DRM

Wowza provides a streaming platform whose users include media companies, corporates, government, and a variety of sports leagues and organisations. With broadcast now so widely available, best practice in DRM and content protection can be inconsistent. A regional sports league or individual sports club may not have the expertise, budget, or the awareness to implement the same content protection strategies that big sports broadcasters take as second nature.

‘There’s no ‘better way’ that replaces DRM, but the effectiveness comes from intelligently combining tools based on content value and risk’

“Any kind of high value content should have DRM, but I don’t think that’s always the case,” says Wowza chief solutions architect, Barry Owen. “Sometimes you should also have tokenised URLs to prevent link sharing and CDN leeching. Some people do that, some don’t. And some will do tokenised URLs but not do DRM, which is half a solution.”

Managing who can see and access content isn’t just about the relationship with a public audience, it should be a consideration when anyone anywhere can view your content.

“I tell customers, even if they’re streaming in corporate networks – or what might be considered ‘internal streaming – to use at least encryption, if not full DRM because who knows if that content might be leaked by an employee? DRM is easy, and it’s inexpensive, in the scheme of things,” he adds.

“Even tier two or amateur sports are still trying to monetise their content through subscriptions.

If somebody gets a hold of, for example, an HLS chunk list, they can still steal it. It’s not high value content, but it’s very specific content for certain people and there’s an audience for it.”

Wowza has EZDRM’s Universal DRM technology embedded in its platform for both live and VOD. Universal DRM combines Google Widevine DRM with Microsoft PlayReady DRM and uses linked CENC keys. Wowza’s Streaming Engine platform also makes it easy for customers to use other third-party DRM plug-ins.

The future of content protection may also require a rethink of content distribution too. Eluvio is attempting to upgrade how we do streaming with its Content Fabric, which runs as an application protocol across an open global network of nodes.

“We stream rugby worldwide for URC TV and EPCRTV, and all of their live feeds are protected by strong DRM to all of the consumer devices,” explains Eluvio founder and CEO Michelle Munson. “That’s an end-to-end capability in the fabric, built into the just in time transcoding model.”

A core principle of Content Fabric is that the content is owned and self-protected in the network. All of the content parts for live streams or VOD are encrypted for the content owner with owner keys. The re-encryption of those elements for broadcast happens dynamically using the DRM key space as the target.

“Those broadcast windows are hugely important to the contract soundness of doing streaming,” says Munson. “URC has Premier Sports and other broadcasters as licensees, and those authorisation policies ensure that viewers in those sold regions are not able to access the content, but everyone else can do so seamlessly. That is very different to how this sort of thing has been done in the past, and it makes it possible for a smaller organisation to have extreme scale.”

A coordinated defence

Eluvio aims to reduce the multiple hand offs in technology that occur in the streaming chain. Each step there is a potential attack surface for a bad actor. Through partnerships with vendors and industry collaboration these vulnerabilities can be reduced, but not eliminated.

Employing DRM is like locking your front door. If someone wants to open the lock, they’ll need the key. But if someone really does want to get into your house, no front door lock is going to stop them. Amazon is looking at a future which augments the likes of DRM with dynamic content protection systems powered by AI.

“AI systems can analyse user behaviour patterns, including device usage, viewing locations, concurrent stream counts and viewing times to detect credential sharing or fraudulent account access,” explains Dvorkin. “These systems can identify anomalies such as impossible travel scenarios – like viewing from different geographic locations simultaneously – or unusual viewing patterns that indicate account compromise. These systems could detect when live sports are being illegally redistributed in near real-time, enabling rapid takedown responses.”

While tech vendors will continue to evolve powerful integrated solutions, ultimately, it’s the customer who has to take responsibility.

“At the end of the day, the decision of how to protect content is the content owners’,” says Owens. “They get to choose what services they use and what level of protection they apply. But the service providers should definitely make it easy and as simple as possible.”

SVG Europe is running an anti-piracy workshop at FutureSPORT 2025 called ‘Battling the pirates – Practical strategies for sports content protection’. The workshop will offer real-world examples and practical solutions for producers, broadcasters, leagues, federations and other rights owners. To find out more and to register, go to: https://www.svgeurope.org/future-sport-2025/programme/.