56 TVBEurope Feature
who understand this stuff, making it even harder. So if you’re a pirate, not only do you have to be able to reverse engineer software, but you’re going to need a very, very high level of maths to understand what’s going on. The range of people who can actually get anywhere with it becomes vanishingly small.” Today, studios and broadcasters want content delivered to every device. The challenge they face is how to protect content running across all those devices, from DVDs to mobile phones, often being transferred from one to the other and back again.
“There’s a lot of innovation, and that’s good,” says Bond. “People want to have everything on everything. But every new device becomes a new potential attack point that needs protecting. Historically, the broadcast space has been secure because it was all contained in a sealed metal box that came from a manufacturer, and no one really quite understood exactly what was going on. Your first challenge was to open the box and see where the wires went to try and understand what was happening on a chip. Now it’s all software and it’s quite open.”
“Ultimately, someone can point a camera at a screen and take a video of it. That’s always going to be a threat.”
Some new platforms are more piracy-prone than others. Bond believes that tablets and phones, fast becoming the screen of choice for a whole generation, are probably the most vulnerable. “An Android or iOS device is a fairly open platform. It feels just like a computer, so someone who knows what they’re doing can access it easily.”
Coming out of the shell Like overprotective parents, content owners, after taking all necessary precautions, finally must let their content go out into the wide world alone.
“At some point the content has to come out of its shell and get shown on the screen or get moved around in the clear,” Winston says. “The weak point in everything is that the content has
to go through some kind of player that unwraps the DRM on an end device. And that end device is not under the control of the broadcaster.” “What we work on is stopping people from getting a high-quality copy from the broadcast stream that arrives on their device. But ultimately, someone can point a camera at a screen and take a video of it. That’s always going to be a threat. “ With Ultra HD images beginning to enter the content market, pirates are being given a pixel count that, with a camcorder in a dark room and some post processing, could produce a first rate HD copy, at the very least. The truth is that if people want content, they will find a way to get it. The solution to the piracy of the plays of
William Shakespeare was the production of the First Folio, a pristine, all-encompassing volume of the entire Shakespeare canon. Giving audiences what they wanted in the highest quality version seemed to be the answer.
It still seems to be true today – depriving users of content guarantees they will find an illegal way of getting it. Offering it in the best way possible might keep them coming back for more.
www.tvbeurope.com September 2014
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