Javier Perea, CEO at Smart Protection, was one of the speakers who participated in Nextv CEO Latin America, leading conference organized by Dataxis, which was held last week at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Miami. In a one-on-one session entitled ‘As digital piracy continues to evolve, is technology the best way to fight back’?, the executive expressed himself on the matter and released figures that describe the current situation of content piracy in the region.

‘Piracy takes place worldwide, but the three regions with the highest consumption (of piracy  content) are Asia, Africa and Latin America, where 50% are supposed to be illegal content’, said the executive, who later explained that “In Latin America, of the 260 million internet connections recorded, 160 million consume piracy content, and on pay TV  these contents are consumed by 30% of subscribers’.

Perea also gave his point of view about content democratization, and said it led to a piracy increasement, because there is a lot of content available on the internet and many people do not want or cannot pay to access it’. In addition, the executive said that ‘legal measures are slow, expensive and not very efficient, and enforcement is required’ to combat content piracy. Taking it into account, Perea insisted on the need to use technology, with companies that do prevention, to take action against it. ‘We can think of an antivirus that, when it identifies pirated content, it removes it, finds its connection and removes the video that caused it. We are strong in protecting Spanish or Portuguese-speaking content’, he said.

‘With ‘La casa de papel’ (Money Heist), which was a long-awaited series, five hours after its release, all episodes were available on the internet. We were able to remove more than 500 thousand videos in a few weeks, more than 95%’, said the executive. “Piracy is here to stay. Ignore it will not make it disappear. We have to see who can do what. In addition, platforms cannot verify everything that is uploaded. We must act diligently before a lawsuit made by the party’, he concluded.