Exclusives

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. — Digital rights management, watermarking, BitTorrent, hardware with piracy applications built in, live, illegal streams of copyrighted material … there are a lot of moving parts around piracy and how to confront it nowadays.

But for Eyal Arad, CEO and co-founder of cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) platform provider Videocites, piracy all comes down to one metric.

“Lost eyeballs is the key parameter when you talk about content protection,” he said, speaking Dec. 5 during a presentation at the annual Content Protection Summit, presented by the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA). “The challenge we see is minimizing that.”

The solution? Video search technology, using machine learning, that can almost immediately detect pirated videos. The technology allows content owners to constantly track their videos, wherever they appear, and allows them to ID distribution patterns and engagement of the videos across the internet, Arad said.

Videocites’ Hollywood customer case studies show the technology can reduce lost views by 90%, “an amazing number,” he added, thanks to its ability to detect pirated videos almost immediately after they’re shared. “Manual searches, as most technologies do it, you can’t look everywhere all the time. That’s a main problem,” Arad said.

The company’s solution continuously searches, always, to detect copies as soon as they appear, and puts out takedown notices before illegal views can get out of hand.

Scalability is key as well, simply because of the sheer amount of content being produced and tracked today. That’s where a cloud-based, modular approach comes in handy, allowing for scalability to handle thousands of videos at the same time, Arad said. And while many illegal videos can’t be found textually due to metadata or language dependency, Videocites uses technology that detects videos using their visual properties, boosting detection by up to 40%, he said.

“We can find if someone took just a few seconds out of your movie, and put it in some other place,” Arad said. “We can detect it and point out where those five second were used in a large compilation.”

Above all else, Videocites’ AI-based automated search engine is geared toward reducing the costs involved with the slow and time-intensive manual searches employed by many, he said.

“This detects the undetectable, and does it [cheaper],” Arad said.

The 2018 CDSA Content Protection Summit was presented by SafeStream, and sponsored by Edgescan, Microsoft Azure, LiveTiles, Aspera, Amazon Web Services, Convergent Risks, Dolby, Illumio, NAGRA, EIDR, the Trusted Partner Network (TPN), Videocites, Human-i-t, Telesoft and Bob Gold and Associates and is produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) in association with CDSA, the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Smart Content Council and Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH).

To download the presentation and audio of the Videocites presentation, click here and here.