The challenge

Wired magazine declared 2021 the start of a “platinum age” for online piracy. Piracy, made easier by content streaming, is a major issue for media and entertainment companies. Many companies have entire departments dedicated to spotting infringing content, understanding the changing landscape, and figuring out how to respond.

One of the biggest media companies in the world came to us for help modernizing and unifying the data infrastructure supporting their anti-piracy efforts. They had a long track record of rigorous anti-piracy enforcement, and were ramping up their efforts even more to meet the challenges related to their scaling streaming platforms.

Their anti-piracy enforcement efforts involved a range of their internal departments, as well as dozens of outside vendors and partnerships with Facebook and YouTube. All of these entities were searching for leads and tips related to potential copyright infringements or piracy actions – and they were all reporting the tips in slightly different ways, some in different manual systems, creating duplicates and overall chaos. On top of that, they had different vocabulary from different systems; for example: Incident, Notice, Claim, and Infringement.

The solution

We proposed designing and optimizing an end-to-end FullStack solution incorporating best practices and domain expertise. The new data solution would both support the growing needs of their anti-piracy team and replace their existing platform, which was not designed with modern technology, workflows, and best practices. It would also update their slow reporting process, which relied on cumbersome manual uploading.

We transitioned them from their in-house system to a platform based on the Snowflake Data Cloud. The new platform automatically ingests raw and historical data from the client’s variety of internal units and vendors into a centralized data lake. We centralized and standardized business rules and definitions and made them transparent to stakeholders across the organization, and built in scalability and flexibility to make it easy to add new data sets and change metrics and dimensions as needed.

We made their centralized data easily accessible by providing self-service business intelligence tools and capabilities to create a unified, holistic view of the anti-piracy data. The tools empower the anti-piracy team to extract reports on infringement notice data received from various sources and provide them to different business segments with varying levels of granularity to meet their business needs. They can now track trends by date, property, and response type across data sources, allowing them to work with their vendors to develop more relevant and efficient enforcement campaigns.

How did it turn out?

The client’s modern cloud-based data platform creates a consolidated, holistic, reliable, and governed single source of truth, providing the anti-piracy team and other stakeholders with a unified view of the anti-piracy data. Critical data is now available daily (or even more frequently), and is easily accessible by both technical and non-technical users. The modern FullStack approach drives operational efficiencies and opens up next-level insights, leveraging best-in-class technologies and optimized processes and workflows.

With a wealth of accessible, up-to-date data from reliably consolidated multiple sources, the client is now able to make informed decisions based on holistic, 360° information and effectively grapple with the growing anti-piracy and copyright infringement challenges facing the media and entertainment industry.