Raiding the piracy crisis
Posted on Mar 4, 2025 by FEED Staff
FEED sits down with Robin Boldon of Friend MTS to understand why it takes a village in the fight against piracy
Sponsored editorial
There have been major global crackdowns on online piracy in the last year, with several arrests being made in the UK targeting illegal streaming. With online piracy on the rise in recent times, it’s vital that new methods be explored to tackle the crisis.
Friend MTS has approached the content protection problem with a holistic view. “We make many observations every day regarding the piracy we see online,” introduces Robin Boldon, head of product at Friend MTS. “We then use various techniques to take that piracy apart and observe all the different network technology components.”
Tracing the source
In the process of tackling online piracy, Friend MTS looks at how pirates organise their infrastructure. “We can also examine the content being made available for piracy,” continues Boldon, “and combine those observations with other technologies and techniques. The most obvious is forensic watermarking. Many of our customers have deployed this technology, allowing us to trace back to the original source that the pirate is using to steal the content. This is particularly important for high-value content.”
He adds: “Content must be exploited in a short space of time, such as live sports, where there’s a significant price tag for that exclusive content. In the case of football, you have 90 minutes to realise its value. Much of that work needs to be done at scale as well as in real time to identify that content, which then allows us to implement Dynamic Server Blocking or domain blocking.”
Master of your domain
Domain blocking is the ability to identify a pirate domain (such as piratepete.com) and see if it’s responsible for hosting or making available pirated streams or content.
“We verify that, if that is the case, then the domain is added to a block. Within the UK, a court order is then sought and obtained,” adds Boldon. “That compels the ISPs to block those domains subject to the court order. More recent orders allow for a certain degree of dynamism.
“If piratepete.com moves to piratepetetwo.com or indeed another name – though it’s clear it’s within the same infrastructure with the same assets – the court may allow that to be dynamically amended. The updated list of targets is then passed to the ISPs.
“The ISPs then prevent their subscribers from accessing that content. Dynamic Server Blocking is an innovation we have pioneered over the last seven years, which allows us to go into far more depth and detail about pirate infrastructure.”
Canadian collaboration
Friend MTS recently partnered with an array of Canadian service providers to combat sports piracy. The partnership demonstrates how organisations can collaborate to tackle the ongoing crisis.
“This is significant because it brings together a whole collection of licensees and rightsholders,” elaborates Boldon. “It means more rightsholders and their partners can recognise the value of this blocking technique. It’s an efficient use of time, reduces duplication of effort and enhances both effectiveness and accuracy.
He concludes: “From a practical perspective, pirates rely on a lack of collaboration and coordination within the industry. That is how they are able to be successful. Closing that gap, being more collaborative and understanding that it’s an industry-wide problem is how we effectively tackle it, as opposed to trying to do it as individual organisations.”
Visit friendmts.com to learn more about Friend MTS’s cybersecurity and anti-piracy solutions
This sponsored editorial was first published in the Winter 2024 issue of FEED
