How Muso is harnessing piracy data to support media companies

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Piracy has long been an obstacle for the entertainment industry. Leaks happen from time to time, resulting in loss of viewers and revenue for global media giants. According to a report by Forbes, pirated video material gets more than 230 billion views every year, costing the US economy between $29.2 billion and $71 billion.

The problem is simply unavoidable in the digital age, but London-based Muso turns the challenge into an opportunity by mobilizing global piracy data. The company today raised $3.9 million from Puma Private Equity.

Muso tracks billions of visits, views and downloads on P2P and license-free streaming sites and provides entertainment networks with consumption and audience insights to inform their content strategy.

“By its nature, hacking data is very loosely structured and the hacking ecosystem is constantly changing, making it a very difficult area to measure. new sites appearing daily. Other challenges include the ability to accurately identify content, with piracy sites failing to meet any established labeling standard," Andy Chatterley, CEO of Muso, told VentureBeat.

The company uses a microservices architecture and proprietary technologies to manage these changes and accurately convert all the mass of unstructured data into structured information. Once done, the information is processed and provided to businesses through a dashboard or API, helping them better understand the global consumption of unlicensed digital content. This ultimately helps them acquire and commission new content, unlock new marketing opportunities, leverage the value of licensing negotiations, inform anti-piracy strategy, and maximize and optimize windowing strategies.

"The data is used by multiple parties, including studios and networks who want to better understand global audiences and demand for content, talent agents who want to understand the impact on their clients' revenue, movie groups who want to maximize revenue and broadcasters and VoD platforms who want to identify titles to acquire and order.These groups and many others use piracy data to increase the value of digital content and maximize revenue and return on investment,” Chatterley said.

Muso Dashboard

At its core, Muso's platform tracks over 325,000 movie and TV series titles across global piracy networks every day. This data feeds into three main products: Discover, Protect and Connect. Discover, as the company explains, measures the daily consumption of digital media on the global piracy network. Protect uses Discover's tracking capabilities to find and remove pirated content. At the same time, Connect helps identify audiences for digital advertising by targeting segments based on unauthorized audience data and behavior.

The company started in 2009 and has been adopted by major networks and media companies, including Amazon Studios, The Walt Disney Company, National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), NOS, Lionsgate, MNRK (formerly eOne Music) and Sony. Interactive Entertainment Europe.

“We started the business in its initial phase, slowly developing both customers and products. This was accelerated with our first round of investment and we saw strong growth and demand for our data product, providing...