DENVER—The International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP) has announced the addition of DirecTV, a leading video distribution company in the U.S., as its newest member.
While IBCAP remains focused on anti-piracy efforts for the multicultural video market, the addition of DirecTV will permit IBCAP to broaden its scope as it works with DirecTV to identify the sources of piracy of mainstream American content.
“As technology advances, it is becoming easier for pirates to stream hundreds, sometimes thousands, of channels on a single service, with many of these illicit platforms growing bolder by offering American channels and sports,” said Brooke Mallette, senior vice president of legal at DirecTV. “We joined IBCAP to leverage its proven technical expertise in piracy detection and its legal success in curbing copyright infringement. As an initial step, IBCAP will identify pirate services that illegally offer the same channels as DirecTV, while we also increase our collaboration with programmers and channel providers to pressure pirate services and their hosting providers to shut down unauthorized streams.”
In its state-of-the-art lab, IBCAP monitors more than 100 versions of set-top boxes and related services, as well as hundreds of websites and a multitude of social media and mobile apps, to identify pirated content. On platforms monitored for piracy of international content, the IBCAP lab is finding an increase in piracy of mainstream American content, including general entertainment channels, sports and video-on-demand (VOD) — an area where DirecTV would like to see increased enforcement by content owners.
“The addition of DirecTV to IBCAP broadens our ecosystem to strengthen our fight against piracy by taking on pirates who are illegally streaming content that DirecTV also distributes,” said Chris Kuelling, executive director of IBCAP. “With our industry-leading automation for detecting infringement on set-top boxes, as well as our lab’s expertise, we will provide DirecTV with critical intelligence about infringers to curtail unauthorized streams.”
For more information about IBCAP membership, visit https://www.ibcap.org/membership.
