More than 41 million soccer fans worldwide had access to illegal streaming feeds of the FIFA World Cup games, according to a report from Viaccess-Orca, a company that develops anti-piracy software. The company fused three reports into one global analysis that monitored how well its anti-piracy software identified and stopped illegal feeds of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
During the 32-day World Cup campaign, VO identified several important trends and details about the piracy landscape:
• The total number of piracy links detected during the football championship game was 40,713.
• Social media played a critical role in piracy during the tournament, with a total of 14,615 links for the three most popular social media networks, representing 41,371,139 viewers.
The research analyzed audience measurement figures by country for each monitored football match across different platforms. It also examined the role and responsibility of rights owners, consumers, content distributors, ISPs, platforms, ad servers, and payment providers in stopping illegal streaming.
VO helped operators combat illegal streaming distributed via networks, portals, social networks, plugins, or OTT STBs. In general, VO partners with user-generated content sites, search engines, and social networks, like YouTube, Google and Facebook to remove illegal links within minutes from any of those platforms, according to the company.
"The number of illegal streaming networks is growing, and this is an issue that needs to be dealt with urgently," said Christine Maury Panis, executive vice president, general counsel and security, at Viaccess-Orca. "Creating awareness about the end-to-end chain and sharing it with public stakeholders is important, so that each player has a deep view on the overall landscape and the part it can play in absolving this problem. We hope that these reports provide clarity about the reality of illegal streaming and show how operators can deter it with intelligent anti-piracy services."
VO will demonstrate its anti-piracy services at IBC2018, Sept. 14-18 in Amsterdam at stand 1.A51. Request a meeting here https://www.viaccess-orca.com/what-s-new/events/ibc-2018.
