Irdeto Incorporates AI Into Anti-Piracy Software To Combat Illegal Streaming

Dutch cybersecurity company Irdeto has released an updated version of its Piracy Control software solution that could help digital steaming companies protect their product.

Online piracy remains a major problem: an estimated three million people illegally watched the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight last August, and a BBC survey found that 36 percent of Premier League fans watched pirated livestreams. More than half — 54 percent — of millennials reported in a Sport Industry Group survey that they watched illegally streamed sports.

Irdeto’s new platform offers rapid detection capabilities and includes artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to detect logos, text and faces, in addition to video fingerprinting for metadata.

“What the team did was set out to create a large data set of all possible channel logos,” Irdeto vice president of technology Peter Oggel told the UK-based tech site Alphr. “I think we got dozens of channels with hundreds of thousands of samples, that led to a complete training data set of more than three million samples.”

Irdeto counts the Premier League among its clients, as well as content providers such as Comcast, beIN SPORTS, Rogers and Twentieth Century Fox; it was also the first digital rights management tool approved for use by the Chinese government.

These logo detection methods have caught the attention of pirates, an Irdeto executive told Alphr, which has led to blanking or swapping of logos to thwart the AI.

“That’s where the next phase of the machine learning project comes in,” Rory O’Connor, senior vice president of cybersecurity services for Irdeto, said. “We’re actually trying to teach [the system] to recognise things like football strips so it can actually determine which game is on from seeing Barcelona’s colours, or whomever else’s.”

“It’s a continuous battle,” he added with a laugh. “Today the analysts are quite often hired on their knowledge of football leagues rather than specialist anti-piracy skills.”