Last month, high quality copies of Warner Bros. Pictures’ Dune were reportedly streamed on several illegal sites days ahead of its American release.

The $160-million sci-fi epic, which opened simultaneously in cinemas and on HBO Max on October 22, still managed to gross over $350 million in global box-office collection. Not all films are that lucky.

Hundreds of small budget, pre-release films and TV shows are flooding pirated sites, depriving revenue to the filmmakers.

The pre-release piracy menace has not spared the over the top (OTT) space either. Recently, high quality versions of Netflix’s Army of Thieves got leaked before its release on October 29.

With both theatrical revenues and subscriber growth under threat, global studios and OTT platforms are spending huge sums on technologies to curb the pre-release piracy.

Prominent clients

This is where solutions like Bengaluru-based secure video distribution platform Indee come in.

“In the last few months, we have had prominent clients using Indee right from Netflix to Lionsgate to Paramount Pictures to Disney. A slew of them switched over from their in-house solutions while others switched over from their existing solutions,” said Sharan Reddy, Founder, Indee. Started in 2013, Indee is a secured content distribution platform, which initially focused on independent filmmakers. In 2019, the company expanded its focus to major studios as well. “Between 2019 and now we have grown about 400 times in usage and grown 10X in revenue with a majority of it coming from the studios,” Reddy said.

From 8-10 video links a month, the secured video distribution platform disseminated over 40 million videos this year. What happens is that producers or studios send pre-release contents to influencers, journalists, film critics, celebrities across countries. Also, videos are sent to multiple award juries comprising lakhs of members. Leaks are bound to happen.

Indee uses its proprietary secure streaming platform — which uses forensic watermarks and encrypted streams — that allow major studios and individual filmmakers to send copies of their films or TV shows for promotional and award screenings across the world without the fear of a leak.

If a user tries to take a screen grab or record a screen, an alert is sent or the stream is ended. Indee's platform is used by Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Comedy Central and over 600 others to share content to pre-release consumers.

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