Every Saturday afternoon, football fans unwilling to pay to stream matches are engaging in a whack-a-mole battle with TV companies and broadcasters as they search for free, and dodgy, steams online.
Thousands of people hunt for illegal streams of Premier League games on social media, forums and through subscription services or streaming Kodi boxes each weekend. According to a survey conducted by the BBC in 2017, 65 per cent of 18 to 34 year olds admitted to illegally streaming matches at least once a month.
But it’s getting harder and harder. In the past, a decent stream would take a while to find, but it would reliably last for the entire game. Now, fans often have to repeat the search several times during a game as rights holders and those working for them sniff out and remove illegal content. During the 2017-2018 football season, the Premier League blocked nearly 200,000 illegal streams of its content, with the help of a High Court Order.
Now, they’re not only going after the streamers themselves, but also the sites that host links. Last weekend, fans heading to the sub-reddit r/soccerstreams (which has more than 400,000 subscribers) were not greeted with the usual list of matches and verified links to streams posted by users. Instead, the moderators had posted an announcement – they had voluntarily ceased activity in response to the threat of a ban from Reddit admins.
It’s the latest step in a long-running battle between illegal streamers and fans on one side, and rights holders like the Premier League, who want to protect the value of their commercial assets, on the other. Rights holders and broadcasters work with a number of companies that use sophisticated technology to locate illegal streams, and trace them back to their point of origin so they can be removed.
“You need to be ready prior to the kick-off,” says Mark Mulready, VP of cybersecurity services at Irdeto, which works with the Premier League to tackle streaming. It uses web crawlers similar to the ones that underpin Google to find illegal streams, and groups such as r/soccerstreams that are known hotbeds of links. “Our goal is to remove as many as quickly as possible during the course of the event,” says Mulready. “Frustrate the pirate consumer and drive them back to legal means.”
Wayne Lonstein calls this the ‘whack-a-mole’ approach. His company, VFT Solutions, has highlighted the growing issue of ‘nano-piracy’. Instead of streams going out to tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers, people are now using established services such as Twitch and Facebook Live to stream games to a few hundred or thousand people at a time, often on hard-to-find private channels. “It’s bottom-up piracy,” says Lonstein. “The leaks in the dam are millions of little leaks.”
VFT has built tech that can instantly identify such streams by crawling not only the internet itself, but also the apps and other platforms people are not using. “It automates what a human would do,” says Lonstein. Between January 2016 and June 2018, it identified over 15 billion viewers on 700,000 streams.
But finding the streams is only half the battle – and it’s a war that’s being played out in full view of those watching at home. If you’re a Sky Sports subscriber, you might have noticed a string of numbers in the top right hand corner of your screen during games. That’s a watermark, unique to your viewing card – so if you decide to stream your subscription online via a hacked set-top box, for example, Sky can easily find out who you are. The empty pint glass that appears in the corner if you’re watching in a pub serves much the same purpose.
“With fast content detection and recognition, it’s possible to “close the loop”, and notify the operator to turn off broadcast distribution to the set-top box in a matter of minutes – a key requirement for sports events,” says Simon Trudelle, senior director of product marketing at NAGRA, which provides anti-streaming technology for the German football association and others.
An arms race has developed. Streamers now use technology that can crop, mirror or distort footage so that the source of streams cannot be identified via a watermark. There are devices for sale on Amazon, eBay and Alibaba, says Mulready, that can automatically remove visible watermarks. Companies such as Irdeto and NAGRA now offer ‘forensic watermarking,’ – serial numbers or other information hidden in the video footage, but invisible to the human eye.
Read more: How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams
“Our watermarks are completely imperceptible to the consumer,” says Trudelle. “They’re also resistant to nearly any transformation of the video in size, format or resolution. With that unique watermark hidden somewhere in the content, it’s essentially the digital version of writing your name on your possessions in traceable, invisible ink.”
Once a stream has been found, the process of getting it removed is usually handled by an external company such as Mark Monitor. Its Net Result product has been in operation since 2001, and can quickly petition social media sites and streaming services to block infringing accounts, and automatically serve takedown notices or notify the relevant authorities in a few seconds.
The process is not entirely automated – humans still verify that streams are actually illegal, and the takedown process still sometimes requires human intervention because it’s an activity that often crosses multiple international borders: a Sky feed in the UK could be beamed to a server in Asia and then watched by a viewer in North America.
New legislation is helping rights holders to take down content more quickly, and go after aggregator sites like r/soccerstreams. But a long-term solution might require a softer approach. “Three factors drive piracy,” says Lonstein. “Access, price and convenience.”
Illegal streaming is already a pretty terrible user experience – between broken links, blurry footage, and the dozens of pop-up ads and overlays you have to close before you can actually see any action. Current efforts have focused on making it even more inconvenient. Mulready thinks we’ll start to see rights holders compelling broadcasters to include invisible watermarks as a condition for being granted the rights to events.
Lonstein’s company has focused on education – for example, during last year’s UFC bout between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedev, before it took down streams it used its technology to insert links to legitimate ways of viewing the fight.
As the music industry discovered, the best way to fight piracy isn’t through web crawlers and forensic watermarks – it’s through making it easier for consumers to make the right choice. The viewing experience is slowly becoming more convenient. Services such as NowTV mean that it is now possible to legally watch a live Premier League game at home without forking out for an annual subscription to Sky, for instance.
But access and price are the biggest issues. Broadcasters pay billions for the rights to the Premier League, and the frenzied auction process is driving up costs for consumers. The arrival of Amazon, which will show 20 games a season from 2019/2020, may change the equation. But, it also fragments the market even further – and means that die-hard fans will have to subscribe to three different services to watch their team.
Even if everyone does that, the UK’s unique circumstances mean there will still be a demand for illegal streaming. As part of long-standing laws to protect attendances, it’s actually impossible to legally watch any games that kick-off between 14.45 and 15.15 on a Saturday unless you’re actually at the stadium.
Although r/soccerstreams has shut down, its 431,000 subscribers are already moving to replacements – there are two new subreddits, and an invite-only Discord Server. “Pirates are very resilient. They will adapt and deploy technologies very quickly – sometimes even quicker than legitimate industry,” says Mulready. “I think we’ll be in a cat and mouse game for quite some time into the future.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
