Adobe & Frame.io Become Early Adopters of TPN+ Initiative Fighting Leaks and Piracy

Industry News

by Julian MitchellMay 17^th, 2023

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TPN, the Trusted Partner Network, was established in 2018 to guard against any loss of pre-released content through piracy. But unfortunately, forward planning didn’t fully recognize the extent of how quickly content would move from secure premises to virtual sites. Now TPN has plugged that gap and in effect revamped their service to TPN+, which now covers both physical and virtual sites. What does the new service offer content owners?

Eight of the biggest content owners are founding members of TPN, including Universal, Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Netflix, Amazon Studios and Apple. Though joining TPN and TPN+ is completely voluntary, all owners of content are encouraged to do so. The new service, comes with revised best practices for site, cloud and software application security.

Ever since the pandemic started, the drive to remote working has resulted in the virtualization of the entire production and post-production chain but that comes with certain dangers. TPN wants to mitigate against this. It has been estimated that thousands of companies, from ideas generation to distribution, could be part of the new network and in effect, all of these companies need to be assessed to serve content owners.

Frame.io and Adobe

Although Adobe and Frame.io have been part of TPN since its inception back in 2018, they have also become early adopters of the new TPN+. SaaS-based cloud providers and their apps have come under increasing scrutiny from content owners to present as secure a service as possible. TPN+ is looking to offer that with their continual assessments of providers.

For instance, Frame.io have made a great deal of their Camera to Cloud service, which instantly moves film ‘takes’ from a camera on set to a file on a virtual server. Being the content owner of that footage becomes much more complicated than physical barriers like security systems and locked doors. They need to know that this precious asset is completely safe in this new virtual world.

What can TPN+ promise content owners?

The initial promise of joining TPN and now TPN+ was taking advantage of a single, central, and global directory of trusted partner vendors. This directory would be continually refreshed and strengthened through an assessment regime that would identify vulnerabilities and provide remedial solutions.

For instance, Frame.io already offers security features including Watermark ID, DRM (Digital Rights Management) encryption, and Secure Sharing at the very basic level.

The thinking behind such an official and unremitting service like TPN is to recognize and quantify security threats before they become real and cost studios potentially millions of dollars.

But is this new version of the 2018 service enough to deter the pirates? Companies like MUSO measure unlicensed demand for digital content and track billions of visits, views, and downloads every day. In fact, they offer an automated discovery and removal of pirated content. Whereas TPN seems to concentrate on a passive but effective assessment of its own industry without direct investigation into the pirates.

Free “Best Practices” guide for content security guidance by the Motion Pictures Association

If you need to protect your assets during production, TPN has released a nice “Best Practices” document, now in v5.1, to help you navigate any content security shortcomings in your production and post-production pipeline. That document can be downloaded here for free from the TPN website.

Have you thought about the security of your content if it’s on a virtual site? We’d be interested in hearing what systems you have put in place to guard against piracy. Let us know in the comments!