• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 16, 2016

Nothing is ever quite what it seems. Some people do good, but do it badly. For example, those virus protection solutions became, for a lot of us, the way we became well acquainted with the very kinds scams they were there to  prevent. And, as we've seen, sometimes online advertisers live with the fact that a certain high percentage of their ads have no chance of being seen. So much for viewability.

There’s more than enough vague science to go around.

An article on Streaming Media.com by Troy Dreier takes an eye-opening and unusual look at video piracy where, it turns out, whatever victories anti-piracy firms have are hard to celebrate because the pirates, like bad pennies, seem to keep coming back.

“Premium content owners need to protect their content from piracy, but no solution or combination of solutions has been shown to be effective,” Dreier writes. Later, he observes, “Even when anti-piracy services have a victory—getting a pirate site removed—it’s easy for the pirates to organize somewhere else,” Dreier writes,  “The effort starts to feel like a giant game of whack-a-mole.”

It turns out that one stat--that pirates costs the film business as much as 15% of their box office receipts--itself is a figure no one can quite prove. And as Dreier also points out,  efforts by some anti-piracy companies may be effective, but then again, maybe not. It’s hard to say because it’s hard to know when piracy is being stopped  if you don’t know how much piracy is really occurring.

“We don’t guarantee anything,”   Harrie Tholen, managing director and senior vice president of sales and marketing for anti-piracy firm NexGuard marketing tells Streaming Media.com.

“This 15% ... is about $1.3 billion per year, so if only the studios could reduce the piracy by 10 percent [of that], that would be $130 million. That means that, indeed, by paying a small amount of that to us, they can, in principle, [save money] if they prevent 10% of piracy.”

But does that prevention happen? Hard to say.

Surprisingly, Dreier reports, the best safeguard against piracy might be. . . Netflix. He writes that some experts think a cheap SVOD online service is a good guard against piracy because at a decent price point, the people who would seek out pirated material will decline.

So, in this view, keeping Netflix affordable to the masses would apparently pays dividends to studios by decreasing the customer base for pirates.

A more bizarre solution might be to do nothing at all. Dreier spoke to Richard Cooper, director of video media for a business intel company called IHS, who says most of the pirates are just doing it for the hell of it.

“The problem here is that what a lot of these anti-piracy solutions actually present is a challenge,” he says.  “A lot of people engaged in video piracy, or at least hacking video piracy, breaking the DRM and so forth, are doing it for the kudos. They see every new anti-piracy measure that comes out as a challenge and something that needs to be cracked. This is their hobby.”

pj@mediapost.com