CDN Leeching: The Hidden Threat Draining Sports Streaming Revenue

Session details:

Title:

CDN Leeching: The Hidden Threat Draining Sports Streaming Revenue

Speakers:

Mark Mulready, Vice President, Cyber Services, Irdeto
Lau Zuydervelt, Solutions Director: Anti-Piracy, Irdeto

Abstract:

Video piracy has evolved far beyond illegal downloads or low-quality streams. The latest technique disrupting the global streaming ecosystem is Content Delivery Network (CDN) leeching, a sophisticated method where pirates infiltrate legitimate CDNs to steal and redistribute premium content at scale. This form of exploitation directly impacts live sports, where latency, bandwidth, and quality define viewer experience and revenue retention.

In this session, Mark Mulready and Lau Zuydervelt will examine the mechanics of CDN leeching, the market and consumer forces driving its growth, and the far-reaching business consequences for rights holders and streaming operators. Drawing from Irdeto’s latest findings, they will explore how pirates reverse engineer video applications to access CDN content, leveraging global distribution networks to reach audiences worldwide without incurring infrastructure costs. CDN leeching not only increases operational expenses and degrades service quality but also fuels subscriber churn, erodes exclusivity and raises cybersecurity and legal risks for providers.

Why this matters for sports stakeholders:

For sports broadcasters and leagues, CDN leeching represents a direct assault on revenue, performance and brand trust. Sports streaming platforms already spend up to 30 percent of operational budgets on CDN delivery; when pirates hijack that infrastructure, providers absorb the bandwidth costs while losing subscribers to illicit services. Addressing this threat is essential to preserving broadcast reliability, ensuring fairness in rights monetization and maintaining fan confidence in legitimate platforms.

Takeaways:

• Understand the technical anatomy of CDN leeching and why it is becoming the preferred piracy method for high-value live content.
• Learn how consumer behavior, device fragmentation and piracy-enabling hardware fuel CDN exploitation.
• Gain insight into mitigation strategies, including CDN tokenization, app protection, key lifecycle management, device blocking, real-time anomaly detection and enforcement, and how these approaches strengthen the security and resilience of sports streaming ecosystems.