From reaction to prevention: Why the streaming industry needs a new anti-piracy strategy
August 31, 2026 09.54 Europe/London By Jörn Krieger

Piracy is becoming an increasingly serious threat to the economics of premium video as streaming services invest more in exclusive content and sports rights. Maria Malinkowitsch, Director Product Management at global content protection solutions provider Verimatrix, tells Broadband TV News why the industry’s perception of piracy is changing, why sports piracy is particularly challenging, and why the next generation of anti-piracy strategies needs to focus on preventing breaches rather than simply detecting them afterwards.

Piracy is no longer simply a copyright enforcement issue. For broadcasters and streaming services, it has become a direct threat to revenues, subscriber retention and the ability to finance increasingly expensive premium content.

The pressure is particularly acute in sports. A recent Omdia White Paper, Next Generation Anti-Piracy for TV and Video, produced in partnership with Verimatrix, highlights the heightened propensity of sports fans to access pirated content, underlining the commercial challenge facing rights holders as the cost of premium sports rights continues to rise.

BTN: Has the industry’s perception of video piracy changed?

Maria Malinkowitsch: Absolutely. For a long time, many operators regarded piracy as an unfortunate side issue. It wasn’t considered a major business problem. That has changed significantly. Today, broadcasters, streaming platforms and rights holders increasingly recognise that piracy directly affects revenue, subscriber growth, customer retention and ultimately profitability. It’s no longer simply a copyright issue. Piracy has become a business issue that affects virtually every KPI operators care about.

BTN: Your latest research with Omdia puts particular emphasis on sports. Why is live sport such a major piracy problem?

Malinkowitsch: Sport is probably the best example of how consumer behaviour has changed. Fans often need several subscriptions to follow all the competitions they want to watch. That can easily cost more than €100 a month, while viewers still have to move between different applications and platforms. It isn’t particularly convenient, even for people who are willing to pay. They oftentimes struggle to find the game on the right platform they subscribed. A truly frustrating experience! The result: when legal access becomes fragmented and expensive, some consumers inevitably start looking for alternatives.

The Omdia research shows that sports fans are significantly more likely to consume pirated content than regular viewers. That’s a major concern because all that revenue is very difficult to compensate for.

At the same time, sports rights are becoming more and more expensive. The traditional model where one provider could acquire and finance all the premium sports rights simply doesn’t work in the same way anymore. The costs are too high, so rights are increasingly shared between several broadcasters and streaming services.

BTN: What does that mean for the business case for fighting piracy?

Malinkowitsch: Piracy is a profit and loss problem. It affects ARPU, churn and all the other KPIs of a pay-TV or streaming provider. Why would somebody pay for a subscription if they don’t have access to all the content they want, or if they can get exactly the same content somewhere else for much less money?

Sports makes this particularly obvious because the value of the content goes from 100 to zero when the match ends. That means you can’t wait until after the event to take action. If you take down a stream after the match is finished, you’ve lost the most valuable period already.

BTN: The industry has traditionally relied heavily on detection and takedowns. Why isn’t that enough?

Maria Malinkowitsch: They remain important, but the reactive approach is failing massively when used on its own. The problem is that pirates are incredibly fast. You take one down and ten others can appear. Legal processes and jurisdiction simply cannot move at the same speed.

That’s why I call it a post-mortem approach. You analyse what happened, you identify the pirate and then you take action. But by that point, the damage has already happened. This is why we need to move towards prevention. We need to stop the breach from happening in the first place.

BTN: What would a prevention-first anti-piracy strategy look like?

Malinkowitsch: You need several layers working together. There is no silver bullet. You need strong content protection and access control. You need to make sure that only legitimate, protected applications can access the content. You need to protect the client itself because that’s increasingly where attackers are looking for vulnerabilities.

Then you need continuous monitoring, so that you can see when something is happening. You need targeted countermeasures, so you can react to a compromised device or application without unnecessarily affecting legitimate subscribers.

And you need renewability. When a breach happens – and it will happen eventually – you need the ability to change the protection so that the attacker has to start from scratch.

That’s the fundamental difference between simply detecting piracy and actually making it difficult to operate.

BTN: Does that mean DRM itself needs to be reconsidered?

Malinkowitsch: We know that DRM is not unbreakable. And that’s not simply the fault of Google, Microsoft or Apple and their respective DRM technologies.

There are billions of devices around the world running these clients. You can’t update an entire planet overnight. That’s why you need to understand where the breach is happening and, more importantly, how to prevent it. The connection between cybersecurity and DRM is particularly important here.

The application, the client and the content protection can’t be treated as completely separate worlds. You need a video-centric approach where you can ensure that licence requests are actually coming from a protected and trusted device and a legitimate user, rather than an emulator or a compromised application.

BTN: How important is it that operators actually implement and maintain these technologies?

Malinkowitsch: It’s absolutely critical. You can buy the best technology in the world, but if you don’t implement it properly, what’s the point?

We see this particularly clearly with watermarking. An operator may be marking content, but if they never actually extract the watermark information, they’re not using the technology as intended.

The same applies to software. We still see very old ecosystems where operators are afraid to update anything because nobody knows exactly what will happen to the legacy environment.

I understand that. We’ve all seen systems where an update suddenly caused something to stop working. But that shouldn’t stop operators from making use of improved anti-piracy measures. Security has to be an ongoing process. The technology needs to evolve, and the protection needs to evolve with it.

BTN: We’ve also seen a significant increase in anti-piracy operations involving law enforcement and governments. Is industry collaboration becoming more effective?

Malinkowitsch: I think it’s a little bit of everything. There is more action from law enforcement, there is more technical knowledge, and there is more collaboration.

But we should remember that when we see a major piracy operation being taken down today, the process behind it may have started two years ago. These investigations can take many months, followed by courts and enforcement.

Italy is a good example of a country taking stronger action. Its initiatives have also provided a positive example for other countries.

Industry organisations are cooperating more closely with governments and law enforcement as well. That is definitely gaining traction. But again, you bring one operation down and five minutes later there can be another one. So it is still not something with a lasting effect on its own.

BTN: What, then, should the industry’s anti-piracy strategy ultimately aim to achieve?

Malinkowitsch: We shouldn’t think that we can outsmart pirates forever. We can’t eliminate piracy completely. The goal should be to make piracy more difficult, more expensive and less attractive, and to reduce it to a level that is manageable.

If you can prevent the large-scale theft of high-quality content, the remaining piracy becomes much easier to deal with through traditional measures such as watermarking, monitoring and takedowns.

The industry will never be able to stop somebody filming a screen with a smartphone. But it can make industrial-scale piracy much harder.

That’s why I believe the future is about moving from reacting to preventing. You still need detection and enforcement, but the priority has to be stopping the breach before the content is stolen.

Maria Malinkowitsch is Director Product Management at Verimatrix.

Verimatrix at IBC 2026
Verimatrix will be exhibiting at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam at booth 1.BS20 in Hall 1. Visitors can schedule a meeting with the Verimatrix team here.

https://www.verimatrix.com/webinars-events/ibc-2026/