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Case Study

The challenge

A leading multinational media and entertainment company needed to step up its anti-piracy monitoring from weekday-only to 24/7 coverage. The company’s goal was to clamp down on illegal consumption of high-profile video content by scaling its ability to rapidly surveil and suppress piracy across international time zones. However, one of the biggest barriers to scaling was the high cost of staff working during non-business hours, weekends and holidays. Off-hours monitoring was especially needed to protect the company’s theatrical movie releases that typically open on Fridays. It reached out to Cognizant to develop a strategy and solution to combat pirated content.

Our approach 

Cognizant had partnered with the company’s brand and marketing teams for several years on strategic IT and digital programs, and this longstanding relationship made us a natural choice as advisor for the company’s anti-piracy efforts. We developed a solution that extracts the host information and URLs, and then establishes a quality assurance checkpoint to confirm or reject domains based on final review. The legal notice is then sent directly to the hosting domains with a copy to the client’s legal operations team to check enforcement compliance. Our team’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) expertise ensures thorough knowledge of online copyright and potential infringement. To establish 24/7 monitoring and enforcement, we provide the client with flexible staffing and support for livestreaming enforcement during major sporting and screening events. We have built a database of 9,000 sites that lets us scan faster for illegal viewing. We also analyze illicit streaming devices using testing applications developed with Kodi, the popular open-source software, to verify they’re not delivering unlicensed content through set-top boxes.

Major media company combats piracy

As a result of the partnership with our team, the media company now removes five million links annually and enables the timely delivery of DMCA takedown notices. Illegal streaming can be suppressed at a much faster rate, including the delivery of automated takedown notices to piracy hosts in response to team alerts. The quick legal notification and suppression of host sites is a critical capability that allows our client to reduce the ability of consumers to discover the illegal sites online.

The positive business outcomes demonstrate the value of 24/7 monitoring. Now our client can identify and suppress five million piracy host sites each year, including approximately 65,000 livestream event videos and major movie trailer leaks.

5-minute

response time to reported incidents of piracy

5M

piracy host sites identified and suppressed each year

24/7

monitoring achieved