| | OCTOBER 20198THE ROLE OF BLOCKCHAIN-BASED CONTENT DELIVERY IN THE GLOBAL FIGHT AGAINST PIRACYBy Ashwin Rao, Director, Limelight Networks, IndiaTHOUGHT LEADERSHIPHeadquartered in Kansas, Cambridge Technology Enterprises is a global leader in offering technology solutions that enable organizations to address all their transformational AI needs ­ from strategic workshops to implementation of transformative business solutions through its AI as a Service (AIaaS).At present, nearly all of the new-age OTT service provid-ers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and so on are battling the in-dustry's age-old enemy ­ the digital pirates. They are joining hands with global antipiracy efforts to weed-out the menace from the industry. But is it really possible to remove piracy at a global scale? Some, like Netflix, strongly believe it is as they boast about their competency in doing so. Others claim that any such attempt will only have an impact on the short term. In the longer term, pirates will find a way to circumvent it.This explains why piracy still continues to be a rising behemoth despite large-scale crackdowns on torrent websites and illegal stream-ing platforms. According to MUSO, a company that tracks the scale of digital piracy, nearly 190 billion hits were made to illegal piracy websites in 2018. If the global population is anything to go by, this translates into 25 views per person living on the face of the earth, accord-ing to US Census Bureau of June 2019. And this scale of the piracy market is when the digital penetration is far from 100 percent globally. Imagine how big of a market this will be when digital penetration intensifies. So, let us try and under-stand the true extent of the challenge and how we can apt-ly resolve it by leveraging the blockchain technology.`Content'ding Againstthe Pirates: Adding to the Content Delivery-related ChallengesIt is important to first under-stand how media or content is actually delivered online. Long before a viewer has pressed the play button, a Con-tent Delivery Network (CDN) ­ which uses its specialized Information and Communica-tions Technology (ICT) infra-structure to disseminate media online ­ has already gauged the location of the end-user, the device that the end-user is accessing a service through, its Operating System (OS), the Web Application, local net-work speed, and everything else that has an effect on the content delivery. After analyz-ing all such factors, the CDN transmits the online content or video feed via the closest possible data center (or proxy
< Page 7 | Page 9 >