M+E Connections

By Chris Tribbey

Toward the end of 2015, Hollywood was hit with a massive wave of piracy, with most every major blockbuster and every major awards winner seeing a leaked version released online.

A peer-to-peer sharing group claimed responsibility for a large swath of the early releases, taking credit for pirated copies of Joy, Steve Jobs, Bridge of Spies, Creed, Spotlight, Legend, In The Heart of The Sea, The Danish Girl, Concussion and the new James Bond film Spectre, among others.

And it was all due to screeners, the group, Hive-CM8, claimed.

What the media and entertainment industry can do to stem this problem will be front and center March 22 in Los Angeles, when the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) holds a unique Content Protection Briefing, bringing Hollywood’s top security experts together to tackle the topic “The Current and Future State of E-Screeners.”

“Digital streaming will surpass DVD sales in 2016. If consumers can make the switch to digital, the members of AMPAS, studio executives, and guild members can likewise adapt to streaming technologies,” said CDSA security advisor Bryan Ellenburg. “The key is to offer a simple but secure platform that is easily integrated into the recipient’s usual viewing environment.”

The only major blockbuster to not see a disc-quality leak online during the awards rush? Star Wars: The Force Awakens. And Disney didn’t send out physical screeners for the film.

The CDSA Content Protection Briefing will look at how media and entertainment companies are investigating online solutions for their content, in the hopes of avoiding what happened last Christmas. The move to digital screeners is already gaining traction, with studios seeing an advantage to the security features involved. A stringent on-boarding process, unique user names and passwords, maximum view counts, two-factor authentication, blocking of concurrent log-ins, session-based dynamic watermarking, DRM, and more are making e-screeners more and more attractive for content owners looking to protect their bottom lines.

The event next week, running from 4-7 p.m. at the Line Hotel in Koreatown, will see Joe Daniel, senior solutions architect for Civolution; Cyril Rickelton-Abdi, senior director of content security for Turner; Joel Sloss, program manager of security, privacy and compliance for Microsoft Azure and Dmitry Primachenko, SVP of business development and IT for MediaVu by Deluxe, tackling the current solutions for screeners, and what’s next for an industry that keeps finding its intellectual property under attack.

The Content Protection Briefing 2016 is being sponsored by Deluxe, Microsoft Azure and Civolution’s NexGuard. To register, click here. To learn more or sponsor the event, contact Garrett Randall at 1-310-882-9204 or [email protected].