LONDON—Synamedia has launched several new services targeting an AI-based piracy solution and Synamedia VN Cloud, a managed service for its entire video network portfolio
The company—which bills itself as the world’s largest independent video software provider—says its new approach towards piracy combines digital and human intelligence to zero in on the increasingly sophisticated streaming piracy underworld, providing “unparalleled” forensic insights into the minds, motivations and behaviors of pirates, and their infrastructure and business models, for a more powerful, targeted anti-piracy response.
Synamedia says it is already fueling technology innovations across the company’s security portfolio, helping customers protect revenues, negotiate fair content license terms such as sports rights, and ensure compliance.
The company has used this new methodology to redesign a rich new UI for EverGuard, its counter-piracy operations center and Streaming Piracy Disruption (SPD) managed service. This new intelligence-first security model is designed to eradicate streaming pirates’ businesses and protect legitimate providers’ revenues. In an industry first, the company says—this data-led model also makes it possible to measure the efficacy and ROI of anti-piracy initiatives.
SPD also now includes a new generation of intelligence agents including new client- and/or headend-based watermarking agents that are resistant to pirates’ evasion techniques, and a new analytics agent. Also new is a raft of disruption agents for a broader choice of responses, including new quarantining agents in the CDN and the control plane, as well as device revocation agents for turning off and de-registering devices proven to have been used by pirates.
The new approach towards piracy has also helped in the redevelopment of CSFEye, a credentials sharing and fraud solution that is an extension to the Credentials Sharing Insight service. CSFEye specifically targets fraudsters engaged in stealing or abusing accounts for commercial purposes, who compromise the privacy and identity of legitimate subscribers and pose a legal and commercial risk to service providers. CSFEye now includes the ability to identify all shadow users (both sharers and fraudsters), recommend and execute a range of actions in order to mitigate the risk, and convert them into paying customers.
“Video piracy is becoming an existential threat to the media industry because the barrier to entry is low and the return on investment very high. Eradicating these businesses is made more difficult by the fact that they have sophisticated operations, are well organized, and make extensive use of the latest technologies,” said Yael Fainaro, Senior Vice President, Security at Synamedia.
Fainaro continued, “With a blend of human and digital intelligence we can build a detailed picture of the pirate ecosystem, crack the criminal mind-set and—working closely with law enforcement agencies—ultimately shut down pirates’ businesses. This hard data is an industry gamechanger, making it possible to move away from a best-effort cost model to one that proves the efficacy and ROI of any anti-piracy spend.”
Synamedia says its technology protects approximately $70 billion in operator revenues annually.
VN CLOUD
Also new is Synamedia VN Cloud, a managed service for the company’s entire video network portfolio. VN Cloud combines broadcast quality of service with the latest cloud technologies to provide the flexibility and scale broadcasters and video service providers expect. Synamedia describes VN Cloud as “the industry’s first solution to offer end-to-end video network functionality on any public, private or hybrid cloud, and breaks new ground by delivering the high availability customers demand on a single platform for both broadcast and OTT.”
VN Cloud allows service providers, content owners and broadcasters to quickly test new services anywhere, with support for lab-in-the-cloud, pop-up and disaster recovery events. VN Cloud Portal fully automates the launch, scale up and scale down of channels with elastic resourcing.
“Our managed service proposition allows service providers, content owners and broadcasters to reinvent themselves by delivering broadcast quality services with the cost control and flexibility of the cloud. As we designed VN Cloud, we focused on providing total control of complex, hybrid workflows from scene to screen while managing costs and with the insurance policy of cloud-based disaster recovery,” said Julien Signès, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Video Network at Synamedia.
VN Cloud combines all the elements of a video network workflow in a cloud-native format using microservices. Its containerized video processing stack means that each function, such as encoding, is fully isolated and managed on a per-channel basis. Workflow support includes: the PowerVu portfolio for secure content distribution, low latency ABR, broadcast, Connect inter-cloud connection and ATSC 3.0.
Synamedia maintains and monitors the entire VN cloud stack. Full disaster recovery is available on the public cloud while media processing is supported on-premise. Synamedia achieves five 9s availability by supporting live streaming video workflows across multiple data centers.
