The growth of OTT and Video on Demand (VoD) platforms has revolutionized entertainment consumption worldwide, allowing viewers to stream premium content anytime and on any device. However, this rapid expansion has also intensified OTT piracy and VoD piracy, creating massive revenue losses for global media companies. Recent research shows that piracy websites recorded 216.3 billion visits in 2024, highlighting the persistent demand for illegal streaming. Industry studies further estimate that digital video piracy causes annual losses between USD 29.2 billion and USD 71.0 billion for the US film and television industry.
As video-on-demand piracy continues to scale through illegal streaming, screen recording, credential theft, and redistribution networks, streaming platforms urgently need stronger protection strategies to safeguard their content and business sustainability.
What is VOD or Video on Demand?
Video on Demand (VoD) is a video streaming system that lets users access video content whenever they choose. Viewers are no longer dependent on any fixed broadcast schedule. Viewers can watch movies, web series, sports replays, educational content, or other video programs instantly on any supported device, including smartphones, smart TVs, laptops, and tablets.
VoD is a core component of the OTT ecosystem, providing flexible, personalized, and on-the-go consumption experiences. As OTT content can be streamed from many devices and locations, it becomes easier for attackers to find weak points in the system. This increases opportunities for them to steal, copy, record, and illegally redistribute premium content.
What Is OTT Piracy?
OTT piracy refers to the illegal access, copying, and distribution of premium video content delivered through OTT streaming platforms. It includes activities such as unauthorized downloads, credential sharing, screen recording, ripping encrypted streams, and redistribution through torrents, cyberlockers, illegal IPTV services, and piracy websites.
VoD piracy causes major financial losses for content owners and platforms, reducing subscription revenue and devaluing exclusive releases. With increasingly sophisticated piracy networks, protecting premium content has become essential for streaming businesses.
What Are the Common Types and Sources of Video-On-Demand (VOD) Piracy?
| Type | Label | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Cam | CAM-Rip, CAM, HDCAM | Taken by an audience with a camcorder at theater. Very low quality video and audio. |
| Telesync | TS, HDTS, TELESYNC | Taken by a theater worker in the projection booth. (uncommon) |
| Screener | SCR, DVDSCR, BDSCR | Ripped from early DVD or BD releases for movie reviewers(e.g., Academy members). It is now banned by Academy and Emmy. |
| DVD/Blu-ray Rip | DVDRip, BDRip, BluRay | Encoded(ripped) directly from the output of DVD/Blu-ray disc player. The most common type of VOD leakage until now. |
| Web Rip | WEBRIP, WEB | Extracted from non-DRM streams or recorded via HDMI/HDCP stripper. The reason DRM and output protection are needed. |
| Web Download | WEBDL, WEB-DL, HDRip | Extracted from VOD streaming and remuxed without re-encoding. The leaked video has the same quality as the source. The reason why hardware DRM is needed. |
VoD formats allow users to access video content at their convenience on a diverse range of devices, ranging from TV sets and personal computers to tablets and mobile phones. This also creates leakage points from where pirates can access the content and push it to peer-to-peer (P2P) space, which is the breeding ground for premium pirated content.
What Are the Key Factors That Contribute to VOD Piracy?
Several technical and behavioral factors enable VoD piracy and allow illegal users to access and redistribute premium video content. When combined with increasing device diversity and global accessibility, these vulnerabilities create multiple attack surfaces across OTT streaming platforms.
Credentials Sharing
Credential sharing occurs when users share a single subscription account with multiple unauthorized individuals. While often viewed as harmless, widespread sharing reduces platform revenue and exposes accounts to theft, resale, and illegal usage through the open web and dark marketplaces.
Token Theft
OTT platforms use authentication tokens to validate active sessions. Pirates can steal, copy, or reuse these tokens across different devices, granting illegal access without needing login credentials, expanding the risk window for OTT piracy.
Trial Abuse
Many streaming platforms offer free trials to attract new users. Pirates repeatedly exploit these offers using fake emails, virtual identities, and temporary payment sources to access premium content without paying and to redistribute freshly released titles.
Simulcasting
Simulcasting involves capturing content during playback and re-streaming or uploading it elsewhere. This can be done through screen recording tools, VPNs that bypass geo-restrictions, tampered OS environments, or re-quantization techniques used to bypass watermarking on high-value content.
Downloading Content
Despite encryption, readily available tools allow users to download streams by extracting keys or intercepting video packets. Web-Download (WEB-DL), WEB-RIP, and WEBCAP formats enable pirates to distribute high-quality versions identical to the original, making video-on-demand piracy more damaging and harder to trace.
What are the Risks of Ignoring Screen Recording in OTT and VOD Platforms?
Screen recording has become one of the most critical security blind spots for OTT and VOD platforms. Even with strong encryption and DRM, advanced screen-capture tools, virtual machine environments, and modified devices can bypass basic protection and duplicate premium content in full HD quality. Once recorded, this content can be redistributed instantly across piracy websites, torrents, cyberlockers, and illegal IPTV services, impacting revenue from launch through long-tail monetization.
Ignoring screen recording results in major financial leakage, loss of exclusivity, and rapid devaluation of high-value originals, sports rights, and early-window releases. It weakens compliance with studio security requirements and limits legal accountability due to a lack of traceability.
To protect video assets at scale, streaming platforms must implement multi-layered security, including advanced anti-capture protection, output control, and forensic watermarking for real-time leak identification and source tracing.
Distribution of Pirated Videos
An easy method of selling or distributing illegal content is the hardware sales model. One can simply acquire an Android-based set-top box (STB) or a Fire TV stick, load the open-source Kodi player in it, and load some free pirate-content-enabled add-ons to access free video content. These add-ons are preconfigured to automatically update from their respective repositories each time the Kodi application is launched.
Many users who want to access video streams illegally tend to use modified STB devices, like the MAG series, which are IP-based devices meant for accessing free-to-air content but are altered significantly to access premium content as well. These devices bypass the subscription locks by securely logging in to a “stalker portal” for command and control. These portals break the subscription credentials of IPTV feeds and let them be streamed through MAG devices to TVs.
How Can OTT and VOD Platforms Effectively Control and Prevent Piracy?
Key measures to prevent video-on-demand piracy include:
Multi-DRM Security
Use platform-wide Digital Rights Management solutions such as Widevine, FairPlay, and PlayReady to control playback permissions and secure encrypted content across devices and operating systems.
Output Protection and Anti-Capture Controls
Block screen recording tools, enforce HDCP/HDMI restrictions, and prevent duplication on virtual machines and rooted/jailbroken environments.
Forensic Watermarking
Embed invisible, user-specific identifiers that survive re-encoding, resizing, and re-transcoding to trace the exact source of leaks and support legal enforcement.
Credential and Concurrency Intelligence
Detect unusual login patterns, prevent token theft, limit simultaneous device access, and identify account abuse in real time.
Geo-IP, Domain, and Network Restrictions
Restrict unauthorized region access, block proxy/VPN manipulation, and control distribution rights per geography.
Real-Time Piracy Monitoring and Takedown Automation
Continuously track illegal streams across the web, social platforms, and P2P networks to remove infringing content quickly and limit viral spread.
Adopting these practices enables platforms to protect premium assets, maintain subscriber value, and minimize losses caused by rapidly evolving piracy networks.
How Does DoveRunner Help in Stopping Video-on-Demand Piracy?
DoveRunner provides an end-to-end security framework that protects OTT and VoD content from piracy across the entire streaming workflow. Its multi-DRM system secures playback on all devices, while advanced anti-capture and output protection prevent screen recording and unauthorized duplication. Forensic watermarking enables real-time leak tracing, and automated monitoring quickly identifies and removes illegal streams. DoveRunner reduces complexity and safeguards subscription revenue effectively by unifying these capabilities in one platform.
Conclusion
Piracy is a major concern for content creators and broadcasters and leads to huge losses in revenue for the content industry each year. Securing VoD content, therefore, necessitates a thorough understanding of how piracy takes place and identifying the best countermeasures to eliminate the maximum possible threat. While piracy through credential sharing, cam recording, and illegal web distribution by third parties is on the rise, measures such as multi-DRM SaaS, forensic watermarking, IP restrictions, etc., and choosing a trustworthy VoD platform provider can help keep pirates at bay.
FAQs on VOD Piracy in OTT
1. What are the major reasons for the rise in video piracy?
Growing content costs, multi-device access, weak security controls, and widespread screen recording and credential abuse drive the rapid growth of OTT piracy and unauthorized distribution.
2. How can you detect if your videos are being pirated?
Use forensic watermarking, real-time piracy monitoring, automated takedown tools, and continuous scanning of torrents, Telegram channels, search engines, IPTV services, and illegal streaming sites.
3. How is Netflix tackling piracy related to account sharing?
Netflix uses device-level verification, regional login detection, IP monitoring, two-factor authorization, and paid-sharing models to limit password abuse and protect revenue.
4. How can software piracy be controlled?
Implement license enforcement, strong authentication, DRM, watermarking, device restrictions, and automated fraud detection to block unauthorized access and identify repeated abuse.
5. How does multi-DRM help combat VOD piracy?
Multi-DRM manages content rights across devices, encrypts streams, controls playback permissions, and prevents unauthorized downloads, copying, and redistribution across different operating systems.
6. How can you prevent screen recording and screenshots?
Use anti-capture technology, output protection, environment checks, and watermarking to block recording tools, VM duplication, and HDMI/HDCP bypass attempts.
