The Brazen Bootlegging of a Multibillion-Dollar Sports Network
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm surprised the NYT article doesn't mention others.
This part is interesting:
"The beIN antipiracy team believes it knows how beoutQ is stealing the signal. Essentially, the website is re-airing content delivered to an individual subscriber. Since each subscriber has a unique identification number that is usually visible, known as a fingerprint, beIN engineers thought they would be able to easily identify the offending customer. However, the pirates have figured out how to hide their fingerprints."
I'm sure there are challenges in doing this in real-time, and without introducing additional compression artefacts, but isn't this as simple as diffing feeds from 2 or more original subscribers feeds, to find where in the picture the subscriber info is encoded?
(See also Facebook's sudden decision to ban foreign political ads in the Irish referendum)
> ASiD is a true step change in the fight against video piracy. Its combination of discrete identifying symbols, fractional second display and sophisticated placement, and interpretation algorithms make it impossible to obscure or mask with zero impact on the consumer experience.
Seems like a fun technical problem to solve. It's certainly a cat and mouse game, but in this case I think the odds are stacked in favor of the mouse, as this sort of task seems like child's play compared to the work that e.g. video game crackers go through and in that case the crackers have negligible resources whereas this station has vast resources.
More from the marketing brochure:
> The only requirement outside of the client-side embedder library is the installation of a video fingerprint generator appliance in close time proximity to the video encoder. Operating independently of the encoder on a copy of the signal, signatures are calculated and other frame analyses are performed to enable precise triggering and recovery of the identifying symbols.
they start by uploading new firmware to the decoder and changing it to only accept signed images (I bet they already do this, up to date firmware typically runs on a slow carousel on each satellite transponder)
Once you have your code in control on all your valid boxes you can switch the crypto - either the hacked box falls off the crypto and stops working or it does your watermarking - you can send EMMs to all the boxes telling them to identify themselves - blink out their box id in a random pixel somewhere (or do the binary thing mentioned above) - once you have that you send them an EMM to shut off their crypto
1. They got hacked, didn't respond.
2. Someone used the (published) hack to make cheaper decoder boxes. Management decided to sell these hacked, rather than the genuine ones. Or to put it another way, they screwed up logistics of their own boxes to the point that they decided to sell someone else's boxes.
3. Someone started rebroadcasting their signal. First on the internet, eventually on actual radio waves.
Because of 2) they couldn't turn off the hacker's signal. And they didn't want to because this would mean "taking a loss" to shareholders (ie. admitting the financial consequences of their own disastrous past decisions).
So "for business reasons" it may not be as simple as redoing the encryption.
Of course this requires people who actually have the technical capability to do this. These are in VERY short supply in the middle east, so likely this company is purely a financial construction that outsources all it's technical stuff to the lowest bidder, which itself is a company that bought the system long ago from someone else.
So it is simple, or at least straightforward with no unknowns, provided you can work with the technology you're using.
If multiple channels are involved (the article mentions "10 beoutQ channels"), it is quite possible they have worked out how to compromise the conditional access on the broadcast, allowing the stream to be viewed,processed (and rebroadcast) without the mandated set-top box, and avoiding any client-side watermarking.
Various Pay TV conditional access (read: encryption) have been cracked over the years, it wouldn't surprise me if there are undisclosed 0days floating around.
I've read the stories about migrant labour and construction deaths. They sound terrible but people died in South Africa too. The climate will be significantly cooler than in Orlando. Japan wasn't a footballing power before it hosted the tournament. And literally everyone who wants to host it has to make it financially worthwhile for FIFA. So why the Qatar backlash?
Like being forced to purchase a bundle of channels or a season of games when you only want to watch one team or a specific sport.
If these media companies would make it convenient, ala carte, and priced reasonably, piracy would plummet.
All you need to do is look at iTunes, Spotify, etc.