Based on data gathered by its Eye on Piracy solution which monitored every football match during what it called "a major global event" in June and July 2014, the company says it has identified key challenges that content service providers and content owners face when delivering live television content, including sports events.

It found that three-fifths of the football event viewers streamed at least one match online and that upon the start of the football competition, more than ten new content platforms appeared among the top five link farms. Alarmingly, Viaccess-Orca found a total of 20 million viewers on illegal websites during the entire event, with the number of viewers on illegal streaming websites increasing during afternoon matches compared with evening ones. As a result, Viaccess-Orca sent more than 3,200 takedown notices to pirate site owners.

Interstingly, Viaccess-Orca discovered that social media networks played a critical role during the football competition both in a positive and negative way. The Eye on Piracy campaign identified that social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter were used by specific piracy groups and links. For example, out of 707 takedown notices sent to pirate site owners during a single football match, 51 were sent to content platforms referenced on Facebook.

In a call to action, Viaccess-Orca recommended that legal streaming services should be made available by content rights holders in order to maximise viewing possibilities for subscribers, anytime, anywhere. This it said would approach maximises the service return on investment (ROI). Furthermore, Viaccess-Orca recommended that to optimise the quality of the viewing experience, the size of the streaming service or CDN has to be set and managed carefully considering certain viewing periods are busier than others. The appropriate scalability measures should also be anticipated in order to absorb any surges in demand.

"Over the last five years, piracy has become a serious problem for content service providers and owners, especially during live sports events," commented David Leporini, EVP marketing products and security, at Viaccess-Orca. "The main objectives of launching this campaign were to demonstrate that piracy is a reality, offer our insights about the issue, and show operators and rights owners how they can fight back using an intelligent security solution such as our Eye on Piracy. Overall, we managed to have 35% of the illegal streaming links disabled before the end of each game."

More information about the reports can be found on at http://marketing.viaccess-orca.com/worldcup2014.