5 Preventive Steps to Fight Sports Streaming Piracy
In this cogent clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026, Verimatrix Director of Product Management Maria Malinkowitsch offers five concrete preventive steps content publishers and rightsholders can take to curb illegal streaming.
Step 1: Install an Authentication Mechanism to Ensure a Trustworthy App
Panel moderator and Streaming Media Editor-in-Chief Steve Nathans-Kelly asks Malinkowitsch, “So, what are the specific measures of preventive antipiracy that you can take?”
Malinkowitsch has five steps that she likes to suggest that might give people a new perspective. The first step pertains to managed devices and making sure they’re trustworthy. “Unfortunately, in the world of people watching a stream not being willing to authenticate their application as they would be with a banking app, [it] needs to be super smooth,” she says. “You really need to have an authentication mechanism where you can make sure that the app … is trustworthy, that it’s your legitimate app, that this app is protected against all types of attacks so nothing can be stolen from it.”
Step 2: Be Ready for All Types of Serious Attacks
The second step is “protecting this app in a manner that it’s really not just obfuscating some code, which can be de-obfuscated immediately afterwards with some pre-tool, but really protecting against all types of serious attacks like tampering, like debugging, like everything … a hacker would do,” Malinkowitsch shares.
Step 3: Monitor the Data to Understand Users
The third step involves data and transparency. “You really need specific telemetry to see what is going on on these user applications,” Malinkowitsch says. “So you need to understand how the user interacts. Does that make sense what he does, or would only a malicious device do that?”
Step 4: Employ Targeted and Device-Based Countermeasures
“You need to be able to react, because what does it help you to see that something’s going on on your applications and you cannot do anything?” Malinkowitsch asserts. “So you really need to be capable of applying countermeasures.” She says these countermeasures don’t mean shutting down subscribers; no company wants that.
Malinkowitsch imagines a scenario in which “the subscriber is the father watching a tennis match together with his friends on the sofa enjoying himself. And at the same time, his son is restreaming the content somewhere to piracy platforms. What you definitely don’t want to do is to shut down the father’s subscription, because the 14-year-old son is out of any type of possible prosecution due to age. You want to shut down the stream to the device [that] is going into the kid’s bedroom.” She continues, “So these countermeasures have to be really surgical and absolutely device-based.”
Step 5: Engage in Different Protections of an App
Pirates are smart, and it would be foolish to believe we could outsmart them long-term with a single algorithm, Malinkowitsch believes. “So the whole thing needs to be renewable. That means that … every time you are releasing a new app or you feel that something is going wrong based on the telemetry, you can apply a reprotection of the app, which would be completely different and the hacker would need to start from the very beginning to start hacking your system.” She says her tech people call this “polymorphism,” and it’s “absolutely necessary. And this is usually only possible if you have zero code integrations.”
Malinkowitsch says her five steps “are important to really ensure that there is a fair chance for the platform providers to fight first.”
Join us August 11–13, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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Premium live sports, from basketball and American football to soccer/football and cricket, remain the primary target of streaming pirates in 2026, with the majority of aggressive gatecrashers looking to recast and simulcast high-profile streams while the match is live and its value is highest, according to BuyDRM CEO Christopher Levy in this conversation with Help Me Stream's Timothy Fore-Siglin at Streaming Media Connect 2026. Levy goes on to describe the forms these recasts typically take, the sophisticated strategies pirates use, and the challenges of stopping them, while Sargeway's Sarge Sargent chimes in to discuss the material and opportunity costs of live sports streaming piracy and what that means for streaming operators.
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