
The Brazen Bootlegging of a Multibillion-Dollar Sports Network - mark212
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/sports/bein-sports-qatar-beoutq.html
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rahimnathwani
This isn't the only company selling access to near-real-time re-broadcasts of
live content.

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?

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wallflower
Googling indicates that beIN has started using ASiD which seems to be the
state-of-the-art in digital watermarking at the point of receiving (the beIN
set-top box). I wonder if beIN is still being pirated effectively with this
new deterrence.

> 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.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Anytime somebody says impossible in a statement, you know it's marketing talk.
Just off the cuff, what of simply taking multiple accounts, synchronizing them
based on keyframe similarity, and then sampling from the accounts at random,
applying an invisible distortion filter, and broadcasting?

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.

~~~
wallflower
Interesting. Given the negligible delay of 10 seconds, perhaps they did create
processing clusters to do the pipeline of what you suggested.

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.

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jgh
I'm sure they did, but 10 seconds isn't "negligible" (if you've ever watched
the superbowl in an apartment building on a hot day you'll know what i mean)

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sbarre
Yeah but if your entire country/region is on that same 10-second delay, then
it might as well be live.

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deadlyllama
The decoder box has to decrypt the satellite signal, run it through a video
codec, apply the fancy watermarking, and then output the signal. I'm guessing
they've worked out a way of hacking the STB to extract the signal between the
decryption and watermarking stages.

~~~
sbarre
FTA it sounds like the pirates may actually control the satellite? Arabsat
appears to be the source of the signal, so could the issue be a "leaky" legit
distributor for BeIN?

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dmurray
This article made me wonder if the criticism of the Qatar World Cup - the
working conditions of the labourers, the weather, the lack of football
tradition, the pay-for-play - if that is all planted by Saudi Arabia and her
Western allies trying to discredit and isolate Qatar.

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?

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jonknee
It probably has something to do with the part about Qatar being a very tiny
place (a native population of 300,000!) with very wealthy people and never
having qualified for the World Cup before. That seems ripe for a bribe,
especially because everyone knows FIFA is and was corrupt.

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r32a_
I remember back in early 2000s getting premium satellite tv for free was as
easy as just installing a firmware on your STB. Eventually, the encryption got
too hard and expensive to crack, so regular hackers stopped working on
firmwares.

~~~
ac29
The story behind DirectTV's "bloody sunday" is pretty interesting:
[https://www.wired.com/2008/05/tarnovsky/?currentPage=all](https://www.wired.com/2008/05/tarnovsky/?currentPage=all)

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dalu
All the football live streams on Facebook alone and no one is doing anything
(at least it feels like it) to remove them. And they're all with arab text
scrolling on the bottom. When a game is on, our visitor numbers drop by a
large % (almost completely). When a game is on I can be sure our ad revenue is
down by at least 70%, because those games are so widely accessible via
Facebook.

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deskamess
Is beOUTq a play on beIN? If it is, that's pretty ballsy and in your face!

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denlekke
they should just start airing anti-Saudi ads during the biggest matches

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gonesilent
The other broadcaster inserts it's own ad's so it would just filter them out.

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Anarch157a
Superimpose it on a random area of the screen, making it look like it's
something painted on the field, if the image goes to the satellite with the
message already there, 10 seconds wont be enough to block it without
disrupting the transmission.

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ams6110
Pirating happens when consumers are faced with unreasonable inconvenience and
cost to get what they want.

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.

~~~
dasil003
RTFA, it has absolutely nothing to do with your reflexive talking points.

