Is It All Lost in the Fight Against Piracy Now?

There’s no doubt that when it comes to this digital era we live in, there are plenty of resources for ordinary people to simply act against the common good. An outstanding example of this is how, every day, hundreds of thousands of people use any kind of trickery under their sleeves, including free movie streaming sites, to access content otherwise banned for them by their creators.

For industries such as online entertainment, this is one of the biggest challenges nowadays, especially with streaming platforms being apparently helpless to avoid it.

With such a landscape upfront is worth asking, is there anything we can do about it? Have we, in reality, lost the fight against piracy?

We need to keep in mind this is a vast market. Numbers from the Video Streaming Worldwide report made by Statista place the industry at $95.35 billion this year, having a revenue growth of 18%. Similarly, the report says that “user penetration will be 16.9% in 2023 and is expected to hit 20.6% by 2027”.

While these numbers are huge compared to previous years when the market was valued below $29 billion (2021), piracy continues to be one of the biggest threats. Parallel to the rapidly-growing industry of video streaming appeared an intimidating VPN industry to become a game changer.

A Virtual Private Network is a Software as a Service (SaaS) that allows users to hide their IP addresses by encrypting the traffic and providing a proxy server for them to connect without an actual trace, meaning they cannot be tracked geographically or at least not accurately.

Not only are there hundreds of VPN options in the market, but they are also affordable and easy to handle, which significantly contributes to the massive adoption we’re seeing these days.

A study made by Dataprot found that almost 230 billion views of pirated video content are seen each year which is thought to be costing around $29.2 and $71 billion each year to the US economy only. This also represents a huge menace to nearly 70,000 jobs directly affected by it, and the losses of the global revenue range annually between $40 and $97.1 billion.

The good news is not everything is lost; while piracy maneuvers continue to evolve every day, there are options in our hands to pull the breaks and stop streaming infringement. This is a list of effective techniques for spotting probable circumvention attempts:

Use IP Address As A Baseline

The Internet Protocol (IP) allows the internet to identify which devices we’re using and where we’re connected from, and based on this, data is delivered. This is highly accurate information, and since it is a feature all connections must have, it still supposes a great baseline to determine whether we’re authorized or not to access certain content.

Implement Proxy Detection

It is possible to detect if a user is connected or not to a proxy server. Since a proxy connection works by hiding the actual IP address of the user, if a streaming platform can detect a proxy, then it can take for granted that the user is doing this because is attempting to mock geographic restrictions.

Identify VPNs

This is a tricky one! Even though VPNs represent a considerable risk for streaming platforms, they still need to learn how to differentiate the ones that are truly a threat from the ones that doesn’t. While there are VPNs that enable their users to skip geographic restrictions, there are plenty of others that simply don’t. In fact, some of them just focus on providing security and privacy, which are features pursued by many users who need this for a job or personal reasons.

Track down residential IP proxies

Another piracy hack these days is paying consumers to share their local connections with others, it is basically a residential proxy. These connections might seem legitimate but still can be tracked down using IP Intelligence Data.

Establish Granular Access Rules

Undoubtedly, the best technique for streaming platforms to use now is to set granular access rules. As we’ve seen, rather than simply blocking each and every one using a VPN, for example, it’s worth studying each case separately in order to best determine the actions to take.