BROADCAST SIGNAL PIRACY

AND THE CHALLENGES FOR BROADCASTERS SECTION ONE THE BBC’S CHANNELS AND SERVICES

2 BBC UK channels & services

❖ Linear channels - broadcast free to air in the UK via DTT and DTH

❖ BBC iPlayer • Launched 2007 as catch up service, now streams all linear channels live online as well as box sets, online originals • Increasingly the portal through which BBC audiences consume BBC services (3.6 billion programmes requested on iPlayer in 2018)

3 BBC linear channels + BBC iPlayer – BBC only makes these available in UK As LF funded services, not appropriate to subsidise viewers from outside the UK

ALSO content on BBC channels a tapestry of rights, not all owned by BBC – content is inhouse, commissioned and licensed-in, owned by many different rights owners. Typical evening schedule on BBC One includes content from:

▪ BBC Studios Production (the BBC’s commercial production subsidiary) ▪ Independent production companies ▪ Co-productions with global co-producers ▪ BBC News & Current Affairs ▪ US Studios ▪ Sports

Content is often subject to complex territorial licensing arrangement - BBC often only acquires UK rights

4 BBC Studios - commercial services BBC’s commercial distribution subsidiary, BBC Studios Distribution, invests in content production (inhouse and indie) in exchange for global distribution rights. A virtuous circle which helps fund high quality TV content and enables BBC to meet global demand.

BBC Studios Distribution exploits content through:

▪ Content sales (to linear channel providers and SVOD providers in Europe and globally)

▪ Branded channel distribution to platform partners in EU and around the world

▪ D2C streaming services - US Britbox (local Britbox services in the pipeline)

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5 SECTION TWO BROADCAST PIRACY: ILLEGAL IPTV CHANNEL SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES

6 TV piracy – the olden days

• Audio visual content (predominantly films) shared via peer to peer file sharing • required technical expertise • individuals participated as pirates and recipients . • involved sharing IP addresses • downloading software onto home computer • allowing open access to individual computers • a marginal activity • popularity diminishing – now c.5%-20% of all AV piracy

7 TV Piracy - now

▪ Pirated film/TV content now streamed over internet – direct from websites, via apps loaded onto streaming devices or smart TVs

▪ Driven by better broadband capacity and audience demand, streaming piracy now = c.80% of all piracy

▪ Like the legitimate media industry, the pirate economy services different audience demands with a variety of consumer offerings – sports, movies, tv box sets, channels

▪ Most jeopardy for BBC - commercial scale IPTV piracy services unlawfully selling channel bundle subscriptions to BBC channels to audiences around the world

8 A typical illegal IPTV channel subscription service • Offers full suite UK channels + more • Claims to have 9000+ subscribers • Customers from across world • Owns its own technical infrastructure • Website looks highly legitimate • Price point enhances this impression - £389pa • Claims to be partnered with British Chamber of Commerce

PRESENTATION TITLE 9 MyTVAbroad

PRESENTATION TITLE 10 MyTVAbroad

GLOBAL TELEVISION PIRACY 11 Tip of the iceberg

▪ My TVAbroad – a high profile and sophisticated service –pirating linear DTT/Satellite signals by simultaneous and deferred re-transmission – but only the tip of the iceberg

▪ Precise figures as to the volume of such piracy are very hard to ascertain – MPAA research has identified more than 1,000 illegal IPTV services operating around the world (Comments to US Dept of Commerce 29 July 2019)

▪ We are aware (via customers and colleagues around the world) of at least 90+ that carry the BBC’s public service channels – but numbers change all the time – some services simply bundle BBC channels in with thousands of other international channels – while others specialise in export of UK television to British expats / anglophiles

12 TV Catchup

ANTI PIRACY AT BBC STUDIOS 13 Hoola TV

ANTI PIRACY AT BBC STUDIOS 14 iBox

ANTI PIRACY AT BBC STUDIOS 15 Europa Network

ANTI PIRACY AT BBC STUDIOS 16 Global spread of one illegal IPTV pirate – posts on Facebook from discontented customers following a police raid

PRESENTATION TITLE 17 How these services work – details obtained through criminal & civil actions

- Police action seize £0.25m kit

- Numerous bank accounts

- Terabytes of data

- A network of related illegal services stretching across Europe and the USA

- Service up and running again 2 weeks after raid

GLOBAL TELEVISION PIRACY 18 Limits of effective legal remedies

▪ This form of piracy is technically trivially easy – for unauthorised operators to access and copy and/or redistribute channels and for consumers to access and watch

▪ Illegal services are highly mobile internationally - often difficult to establish where pirates are based, where they obtain the signals or which jurisdictions they operate (not helped by GDPR, which has caused whois data to go dark)

▪ Legal remedies are inconsistent, fragmented and difficult to enforce – different countries have different laws, creating safe havens for pirates – in some countries, penalties for unauthorised channel streaming are no more severe than a parking ticket

▪ Meanwhile, pirates can get to market more quickly/cheaply than broadcasters; do not comply with local regulatory regimes, obtain broadcast licences, pay to create content or pay talent / underlying rights owners…

19 Limits of effective remedies – challenges for free to air broadcasters

▪ And for BBC UK channels, because free to air, no direct relationship between individual viewer and the BBC – no way of tracing where signal theft is occurring (different to pay channels - encrypted / customer accounts), making detection harder

▪ Being free to air also creates a challenge of perception: the fact that the BBC broadcasts free to air creates impression that our content is free, piracy a victimless crime

FAQ: is it legal? Yes. We do not offer any pay TV channels, only free to air…

20 Cost to media industry

❖ Pirate services are well resourced, highly mobile, easily able to hide/move location, very profitable, and are flourishing…

❖ We need to get better at prevention, detection, investigation and enforcement – need to explore technology solutions and legal remedies…

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