At IBC 2026, the battle between content owners and pirates escalated into an AI-powered arms race. Both sides are now using autonomous, machine-speed systems — and the stakes have never been higher.
AI makes piracy faster, more scalable
“AI makes piracy faster, more scalable and more credible than traditional media theft has ever been,” explained Tim Pearson, Vice President of Global Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Nagravision. “By the time you act, millions of viewers may have already watched the content and the revenue is gone.”
Miruna Herovanu, Executive Director of the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA), is particularly concerned about how AI is being used by pirates to scale what is already an industrial-scale problem. “Piracy is no longer just about illegal access to content. It has become a structured, commercial ecosystem. What AI does is make that ecosystem faster, cheaper, and significantly more scalable.”
AI is aiding the automation of sports piracy by identifying and aggregating live streams in real time, rotating domains and infrastructure to evade blocking, generating convincing user interfaces that mimic legitimate services, and scaling marketing efforts. Agentic AI has the potential to help pirates self-manage this process to an even greater extent, spotting when a stream is taken down and automatically replacing it, adjusting infrastructure and maintaining service continuity with minimal human intervention.
Agentic AI defence systems
However, rights owners and law enforcement are using the latest agentic AI and machine-learning tools to combat piracy too. “Agentic AI represents a real step change in what’s possible,” said Pearson. “We’re talking about systems that don’t just detect and alert, but that can assess a threat, make a decision, and act on it autonomously within defined parameters.”
At the speed and scale that live sports piracy now operates, Pearson argues that level of autonomy isn’t a nice feature — it’s a requirement. “Any autonomous system operating at that speed requires robust governance, clear guardrails, and ongoing oversight,” he added. “But the alternative is worse. Without intelligent, autonomous defences, you’re trying to fight machine-speed attacks with human-speed responses.”
Big Blue Marble’s AI-powered detection
Big Blue Marble is showcasing AI-assisted tools for detecting and investigating content piracy. Its Content Protection Suite uses AI to analyse behavioural data across DRM, Concurrent Access Protection, and forensic watermarking. The company says the system can identify piracy patterns, credential sharing, and unauthorised redistribution by correlating evidence across multiple protection layers.
An AI-assisted forensic watermarking workflow can analyse recordings from suspected pirate streams and help trace them to the subscriber or session from which the content originated. Other new AI-assisted workflow features include automated reframing from 16:9 to 9:16 for mobile and social platforms, live multilingual captioning, and automated highlight creation.
DoveRunner’s forensic watermarking
DoveRunner highlighted independent testing of its forensic watermarking service by Cartesian, a consulting firm owned by Bounteous. The assessment measured whether the watermark remained detectable after processing, compression, and manipulation of the type used to redistribute pirated content.
The company claims the watermark remained detectable in all test scenarios. “Piracy of live and premium content moves fast, and the tools used to fight it need to hold up under real conditions, not just in a lab,” said CEO James Ahn. “Independent validation from a firm like Cartesian, combined with SportRadar’s decision to bring forensic watermarking into their content protection strategy, reflects the trust the industry is placing in DoveRunner.”
Football’s AI-powered anti-piracy
Football is successfully deploying AI as part of its anti-piracy operations. The Premier League claims to have one of the most comprehensive anti-piracy programmes in the world. During the 2024/25 season, with the help of AI, it removed or blocked over 230,000 live streams and removed over 430,000 infringing links from search engines.
Spain’s LaLiga announced it had teamed up with global edge cloud platform provider Fastly to help detect and eliminate pirated streams, estimated to cost Spanish clubs between €700-800m a year.
Fastly developed a targeted, intelligent detection system that leverages AI and proprietary content signals to identify illegal streams in real time. “We’ve built a system that uses AI to spot illegal streams the moment they go live, rather than waiting for takedown notices after the fact,” said Simon Wistow, Co-Founder of Fastly.
“At LaLiga, we have succeeded in reducing piracy of our streams in Spain by 60% during the 2024/25 season through a comprehensive, end-to-end strategy focused on legal, educational, institutional, and technological measures,” added Javier Tebas, President at LaLiga.
Proactive disruption over reactive takedown
The real value, according to Pearson, is not just faster detection — it’s the ability to disrupt a stream in a way that undermines the pirate’s operation from within. “If you take a stream down, they bring up another one. If you intelligently destabilise it at the source, you erode the pirate’s credibility with their own audience.”
Nagravision offers piracy monitoring, security analytics, device security, and forensic watermarking — and emphasizes that all these solutions need to be used together. “The Nagravision solution applies advanced analytics to aggregate and analyse vast volumes of data from across the distribution ecosystem, including social media, web platforms, IPTV streams, and network activity,” Pearson said.
Content integrity with C2PA
With deepfakes becoming more sophisticated, the industry is investing heavily in content authenticity and media chain verification. Unified Streaming’s Trusted Media adds verifiable authenticity information to live, on-demand, and virtual channel streams, embedding C2PA provenance into just-in-time streaming workflows.
MovieLabs launched version 3.0 of its Ontology for Media Creation (OMC), giving software applications a common language for describing narrative and production elements. At the IBC Conference, the company demonstrated how OMC v3.0 was used in the IBC Accelerator project’s AI-generated film, One Small Crawl.
Trust is becoming the currency of the industry — and AI is being deployed on both sides of that equation. As the Daily observed: “AI is simultaneously the best weapon we have against piracy, while being a significant reason why fighting piracy has become more complex.”
I am Luca Berton, AI and Cloud Advisor. I work at the intersection of cloud security, platform engineering, and enterprise AI deployments. Book a consultation.