Your days of watching pirated live streams may be over, thanks to Cisco

By Lulu Chang October 23, 2016

Cisco has plans to stop you in your tracks — if you’re illegally watching a pirated stream, that is. The San Jose-based company recently introduced a new technology known as Streaming Piracy Prevention, which”utilizes technology to locate illegal redistribution of content on the open internet and closed pirate networks.” And apparently, it’ll help Cisco deny access to illegal live streams, even if you’re in the middle of watching it.

Streaming Piracy Prevention, or SPP, works using a “forensic watermark,” which “identifies the subscriptions/sessions used to source the content, and shuts down the source through the video security system — all in real-time,” Cisco wrote in a blog post announcement earlier this week. And because the technology is completely automated, Cisco ensures “a timely response to incidents of piracy.” That means there’s no need for third parties to interfere, and that there’s now “an unmatched level of cross-device retransmission prevention and allowing service providers to take back control of their channels, to maximize their revenue.” Great news for service providers, potentially bad news for you (if you’ve a penchant for watching free TV).

Cisco is hoping to go wide with its SPP technology, and has partnered with Friend MTS (FMTS) in order to tackle as much of the web as possible. As the tech company notes, “FMTS’s market leading piracy monitoring capabilities feed the Cisco SPP service with real-time pirated video feeds found on the open Internet, which are used by SPP to locate the source of the leak and shut it down.”

So if you had big plans in the coming months to watch all that college football via an illegal live stream, or have been enjoying all your favorite shows in a not-so-kosher capacity, consider this the end of days. Streaming Piracy Prevention just may make you an honest television viewer.

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