How Muso is mobilizing piracy knowledge to help media corporations

Piracy has lengthy been a hurdle for the leisure business. Leaks occur occasionally, leading to viewer and income loss for world media giants. In accordance with a report from Forbes, pirated video materials will get over 230 billion views annually, costing the U.S. financial system between $29.2 and $71 billion.

The issue is nothing wanting inevitable within the digital age, however London-based Muso is popping the problem into a chance by mobilizing world piracy knowledge. The corporate at this time raised $3.9 million from Puma Personal Fairness.

Muso’s piracy analytics

Muso tracks billions of visits, views and downloads throughout P2P and unlicensed streaming websites and offers leisure networks with consumption- and audience-related insights to tell their content material technique. 

“Piracy knowledge by its nature is very unstructured, and the piracy ecosystem is consistently evolving, making it a extremely difficult space to measure. The piracy websites themselves incessantly change domains, with new websites showing day by day. Different challenges embrace the flexibility to precisely establish content material, with piracy websites following no set labeling requirements,” Andy Chatterley, CEO of Muso, advised VentureBeat.

The corporate makes use of microservices structure and proprietary applied sciences to deal with these adjustments and precisely convert the entire mass of unstructured knowledge into structured info. As soon as that is finished, the knowledge is processed and supplied to enterprises by a dashboard or API, serving to them achieve insights into the worldwide consumption of unlicensed digital content material. This finally helps them purchase and fee new content material, unlock new advertising alternatives, leverage worth in licensing negotiations, inform antipiracy technique and maximize and optimize windowing methods. 

“The information is utilized by a number of events, together with studios and networks who wish to higher perceive world audiences and content material demand, expertise brokers who wish to perceive the influence on their shoppers’ revenues, cinema teams who wish to maximize revenues, and broadcasters and VoD platforms who wish to establish titles for acquisition and fee. These teams and extra use piracy knowledge to drive up the worth of digital content material and maximize income and ROI,” Chatterley stated.

On the core, Muso’s platform tracks over 325,000 movie and TV titles throughout world piracy networks each day. This knowledge powers three core merchandise: Uncover, Defend and Join. Uncover, as the corporate explains, measures the day by day consumption of digital media throughout the worldwide piracy community. Defend makes use of Uncover’s monitoring capabilities to search out and take away pirated content material. In the meantime, Join helps establish audiences for digital promoting by focusing on segments modeled on unlicensed viewers knowledge and behaviors.

The corporate began again in 2009 and has seen adoption from main media networks and firms, together with Amazon Studios, The Walt Disney Firm, Nationwide Affiliation of Theatre House owners (NATO), NOS, Lionsgate, MNRK (formally eOne Music) and Sony Interactive Leisure Europe.

“We bootstrapped the corporate in its preliminary stage, rising each prospects and product out slowly. This was expedited with our first funding spherical and we’ve got seen sturdy progress and demand in our knowledge product, delivering 330% progress within the fiscal 12 months 2022,” Chatterley stated.

Funding plans

With this spherical, the corporate plans to help the institution of its advertising operate and construct out its gross sales groups in each the UK and america. In the end, the objective of the corporate is to take product and knowledge capabilities to world leisure industries.

A number of different gamers additionally function within the antipiracy enviornment – MarkMonitor, Smart Protection, Digimarc and Kopjra – however Muso claims to distinguish on the idea of its knowledge stack. The corporate affords an in depth view of piracy knowledge to assist corporations not solely defend but in addition higher monetize their content material. 

“As on-demand streaming platforms develop and drive a fragmentation of content material distribution, world corporations like Muso will play an more and more vital function in monitoring and tackling piracy … We sit up for working intently with the crew to attain their targets,” Harriet Rosethorn, funding supervisor at Puma Personal Fairness, stated.

Between 2021 and 2022, digital piracy noticed 25% YoY progress. In the meantime, Muso measured greater than 201 billion visits to web sites driving piracy throughout the identical interval.