#IBC2025
25 OPINION
COMBATTING CDN LEECHING WITH AI
Jim Brickmeier, CEO, Velocix
For years, the streaming industry has relentlessly pursued scale – more screens, more content, higher bitrates and geographic expansion. We’ve engineered content delivery platforms to handle exponential growth. But today, performing reliably at scale is not the only benchmark for success. Security is increasingly a fi rst- order concern.
Piracy has evolved into big business. What was once a battle over small-scale theft has morphed into a deeper, more insidious challenge – large-scale CDN leeching. Unauthorised services are now quietly hijacking legitimate delivery infrastructure, draining resources, degrading experiences and secretively bleeding revenue from content and streaming service providers. Pirates exploit vulnerabilities in CDN confi gurations like exposed URLs or hijacked authentication tokens to bypass security and stream premium content illegally. Think of it like your neighbour secretly tapping into your WiFi connection to run their e-commerce business. You pay the
monthly bill for the internet connection, while they consume bandwidth, degrade the performance of the system for users in your own household, and generate a profi t on your dime.
“Defending the streaming ecosystem requires smarter tools and stronger alignment between delivery and security”
It is a growing problem, and it is hard to spot because leeching often looks like legitimate CDN traffi c. Leechers use valid- looking request headers and IP addresses, making their traffi c indistinguishable from genuine viewers. In addition, most CDNs are built for speed and scale, so deep inspection and time-consuming security checks are not typically performed before responding to real-time stream requests. At Velocix, we believe defending the
streaming ecosystem requires smarter tools and stronger alignment between
SWITCHING UP TO SOFTWARE For-A
BY KIRSTY HAZLEWOOD
The MRF-5100EX routing switcher is making its debut on the For-A stand, supporting multi-format capabilities up to 8K resolution. Other fi rsts for European markets include viztrick AiDi, an on-device AI solution for real-time video processing, and For-A Impulse, a software-defi ned platform that consolidates multiple production functions into an intuitive ‘station in a box’ concept.
delivery and security. This year at IBC, we’re spotlighting how artifi cial intelligence and machine learning are transforming content protection, moving us from passive monitoring to active defence. We’re deploying real-time data models that can fl ag anomalies, pinpoint suspicious traffi c fl ows, and react in milliseconds. These systems aren’t rule-bound relics. They learn continuously, shaped by live network behaviour. We’re also advancing our integration between CDN logic and session-level policy enforcement. That means smarter decisions about who gets access, under what conditions, and whether a session should be initiated at all. Imagine infrastructure that not only delivers content but understands its context, its rights, its audience. That’s where streaming is headed. This conversation can’t wait. The next chapter in streaming demands intelligent protection, because growth without protection is simply unsustainable. 5.C75
the fl agship HVS-Q12 production switcher. The latter offers broadcast- grade reliability in a compact 4RU package with software-upgradable 3G-SDI to 12G-SDI capabilities. The FA-1616 multichannel
The fully software-based MixBoard offers ‘unlimited’ layering
Also on show is the MixBoard switcher, which offers ‘unlimited’
layering through a fully software- based architecture, as well as
processor, on show with Hierarchical Registration and Discovery System (Hi- RDS) technology, enables smart resource sharing
across production environments. 2.B53
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