The company specializing in telecommunications equipment says it is developing a system that allows them to automatically disable unauthorized live video transmissions. This is a growing problem facing content providers, especially those with subscription and pay per view models.

To be clear, this is not a system to block streaming torrents such as those made through applications such as Popcorn Time, Peerflix, Isoplex or directly from many websites. But to stop services that capture and relay feeds from official sources without permission, as happens constantly with broadcasts of sporting events, to name one of the most popular examples.

There are already anti-piracy companies that are dedicated to tracking the thousands of sites that redistribute the content. The problem is that often the traditional mechanisms of sending a legal order and a host closing a web, sometimes do not work as fast as they want or just do not work. This is where the Cisco system comes in.

“Prevention of Piracy in Streaming”

Cisco works on a platform called “Streaming Piracy Prevention (SPP),” a system that would stop transmissions automatically in real time, which also works without having to send notifications to the hosting companies hosting the content.

Cisco has partnered with Friend MTS, a company specializing in content protection that allows vendors to identify which of their current platforms is being leaked. FMTS embeds watermarks in the feeds of each distributor, so that they can be identified by their own specialized software.

Thanks to the combination of the Cisco SPP platform and FMTS software, video streams can be traced back to the original source and stopped instantly.

The two companies believe that this is a significant problem. Only in September they say they discovered about 12000 HD channels that broadcast content from pay-TV providers. Once a web uploads one of these streamings, it is easy for others to replicate it. This is how they appear hundreds of transmissions of the event on the day of the Oscars. And that’s how Cisco plans to end them.