MultiChoice Group Deploys GeoComply’s Technology to Combat Content Piracy

GeoComply Solutions Inc today announced that MultiChoice Group, Africa’s leading entertainment company, has deployed its GeoGuard VPN and proxy detection solution to combat content piracy. With GeoGuard integrated on its streaming platform, MultiChoice is now blocking tens of thousands of pirate viewers each month while nearly eliminating the creation of suspicious user accounts. This dramatic reduction in piracy has freed up infrastructure capacity and cut CDN costs.

GeoGuard is protecting MultiChoice’s DStv App, which streams live and catch-up content in countries across sub-Saharan Africa. MultiChoice went live with GeoGuard in February 2021 through the Amazon Marketplace, using the ‘turn on and go’ capability provided through GeoGuard’s integration with Amazon CloudFront.

“As for all OTT broadcasters, geo-piracy is a major concern, and it was a real coup when we deployed GeoGuard and quickly achieved a great return on investment. We have been impressed by GeoGuard – it works seamlessly in the background to safeguard our content for legitimate users, ensures territorial exclusivity and helps us comply with our content distribution obligations with rights owners. From an OTT broadcaster perspective, the cost savings and efficiency it’s providing in our streaming infrastructure is a huge bonus.”

Greg van Wyngaard, Senior Engineer, Connected Video Division, MultiChoice

“While many OTT operators know that pirates weigh down their infrastructure – and cost them money to boot – it is hard to calculate the full impact until the pirates are blocked. With GeoGuard, MultiChoice has cut geo-piracy and account sharing dramatically and realised impressive savings on infrastructure costs. Plus, it can now support more than double the number of concurrent users for live-streamed events, resulting in a better quality of experience for its paying subscribers.”

James Clark, Director of Global Sales, GeoComply

MultiChoice chose GeoGuard for its ability to better protect its revenues and business models without impacting legitimate users. With trust in GeoGuard’s data, it can focus on supporting legitimate subscribers. Other factors in its decision were GeoGuard’s regular database updates, to reduce both false negatives and false positives, and its support for SmartDNS, a technology designed to circumvent geo-restricted services.

GeoGuard is independently rated by Kingsmead Security as 99.6% effective in detecting VPNs and DNS proxies and is updated more often than any other solution on the market to ensure the lowest false positives and the highest accuracy rates in the industry. GeoGuard protects over 10 billion streaming requests and over 300 million unique streaming users per month as the Hollywood Studio-approved gold standard. It is also integrated into the platforms of the world’s largest CDN providers, such as Akamai and Amazon CloudFront.