Media company reimagines its service and support experience Bringing consistency, simplicity, and enhanced usefulness to IT service management. For instance, a world leader in media, entertainment, and technology had grown through product expansion and strategic partnerships and acquisitions – but its attainments led to mounting complexities for internal stakeholders interacting with IT.

Developing consistency to support success A world leader in media, entertainment, and technology was enjoying considerable success. It had grown through product expansion and through strategic partnerships and acquisitions, but the scale and pace of its achievements were causing complexities for internal stakeholders interacting with IT. The organization’s growth resulted in five distributed businesses, all operating independently.Processes were siloed within each of the IT functions, and IT tools were a blend of enterprise and distributed elements. Different tools led to different experiences in various group businesses – for example, there were widely varying degrees of self-service. This lack of cohesion also meant that workforces were crossing boundaries between support functions and also between their verticals.

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 develop a strategy and solution to combat pirated content.

Our Approach

We had a 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.