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Friend MTS-Castle Media to tackle Bollywood’s digital piracy using unique watermark tech
MUMBAI: Piracy is a serious challenge to the entertainment industry in India. In fact, according to the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of India (MPDA), India country is infamous for having one of the highest rate of video piracy in the world. Lack of stringent IP protection laws to counter exponential growth of online piracy has made matters worse. In 2008 alone, the industry lost close to USD 4 billion (Rs 27,000 crore) to piracy, going by Ernst & Young estimates. By 2016, the figure may have doubled by conservative extrapolation.
Birmingham-based content protection service Friend MTS sees a business opportunity in bringing back this large sum of non-monetised revenue back to the content-owners in India. Friend MTS is leading a delegation to India that will investigate the escalating problem of digital piracy.
“As pioneers in the creation and provision of content protection services, already used by many of the world’s Pay-TV operators, rights holders and broadcasters, we want to engage with the country’s movie producers and work with them to effectively fight the increasing threat to the revenue of premium channels and rights holders,” said Friend MTS’ global sales & marketing EVP Paul Hastings.
Friend MTS has already established the company’s base in Chennai, with Rahul Nehra overseeing its India operations. He works with India’s film studios, broadcasters and content owners to help protect them from unauthorised redistribution of their live and premium on-demand content.
Film producers and content rights owners such as Kollywood’s Venkat Prabhu is excited “at the prospects of having FMTS track and contain on-line piracy” and are hopeful this will give them a significant upside in local and global revenues. Tamil Film Producers Council secretary T Siva, a film producer at Amma Creation, said, “The industry welcomes these initiatives on digital anti-piracy.” Friend MTS had already helped secure Bollywood movies like Baahubali and Pink against piracy.
India is the biggest film producer in the world making between 1500 and 2000 movies each year, including the cult Bollywood movies.
“By teaming up with our local partner, Rahul Nehra, a well-known face in the Indian broadcast, satellite, content and OTT markets, and growth consultants from Frost Sullivan, the event and our delegation will be an unprecedented forum for discussing India’s spiraling digital piracy problems and how together we can work to stop it,” Hastings shared.
To help the international player understand the complex Indian media ecosystem, it has made an alliance with Castle Media. To guide its penetration in the southern market, it is relying on Novacom. Friend MTS’s flagship service titled ‘Studio’ is designed to identify instances of pirated movies on the internet, and is being used by some of the largest content-owners in the world.
In 2012 India was added to an ‘International Piracy Watch List’ by a U.S. government panel looking to highlight countries not taking sufficient action to address high rates of digital piracy. According to a 2013 article in WIPO Magazine (the journal of the World Intellectual Property Organization), the Indian film industry loses around US$3.34 billion and some 60,000 jobs every year because of piracy.
Identifying each copyright violator by generating unique watermark within the content for each user is what Hastings calls is the technology’s USP. “It uses a sophisticated but lightweight fingerprinting technology, coupled with our global monitoring platform and network forensics, to identify and enforce against websites and apps that are being used deliver illegal content,” he added.
In India Friend MTS is already operational for a leading broadcaster, and in talks with pay TV platforms, OTT service providers, and content makers, to ensure it catches up to its vibrant international clientele. “We deliver digital anti-piracy services for a wide range of customers including content owners such as Viacom and Paramount, sports rights holders such as the English Premier League, Serie A (Italian Football League), UFC, WWE, the International Olympic Committee and leading Hollywood studios. We also protect tier one pay-TV operators such as Sky, BT, nc+ (Poland) and OTE (Greece) delivered via satellite, cable and OTT,” Hastings added in parting.
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Inshorts Group chief Deepit Purkayastha joins IAB video council for Southeast Asia and India
The co-founder and chief executive of the short-form content platform has been inducted into the IAB SEA+India Video Council, giving India a stronger voice in shaping digital video frameworks
NOIDA: India has long been the world’s most chaotic, multilingual and mobile-first digital market. Now, one of its most prominent short-video executives is getting a seat at the table where the rules are written.
Deepit Purkayastha, co-founder and chief executive of Inshorts Group, has been selected as a member of the IAB SEA+India Video Council for 2026. Run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the council brings together senior leaders from Southeast Asia and India to shape standards, best practices and measurement frameworks for the fast-evolving video and digital advertising ecosystem.
The timing is pointed. According to the IAMAI-Kantar Internet in India Report 2025, over 588 million Indians are now consuming short-video content, with growth increasingly driven by rural and non-metro audiences. India’s active internet user base has crossed 950 million, with 57 per cent of users now coming from rural markets. Yet the frameworks that govern how video consumption is measured and monetised were largely designed for single-language, Western markets and have struggled to keep pace with the scale, diversity and complexity of India’s digital landscape.
Purkayastha is no stranger to these debates. He already serves on the AI Council at Marketing and Media Alliance India and as co-chair of the Digital Entertainment Committee at the Internet and Mobile Association of India. His induction into the IAB SEA+India Video Council extends that influence into the global video standards arena.
Inshorts Group sits squarely at the intersection of these forces. Its flagship product, Inshorts, India’s highest-rated short news app, reaches 12 million active users with 60-word news summaries. Its sister platform, Public App, reaches 80 million monthly active users across more than 700 districts and 12 languages, serving communities that most global platforms barely register.
Purkayastha said the opportunity was about building something more representative. “India today sits at the centre of the global video ecosystem, but the frameworks that define how value is created and measured have not always kept pace with the realities of our market,” he said. “Being part of the IAB SEA+India Video Council is an opportunity to contribute to a more representative and future-ready approach, one that accounts for diversity in language, context, and user intent.”
As a council member, Purkayastha will contribute to shaping regional standards across video advertising, measurement and platform governance, with a focus on frameworks that are native to India’s multilingual, mobile-first ecosystem rather than imported from global benchmarks designed elsewhere.
For years, India has been content to play by rules written for other markets. Purkayastha’s induction is a signal that it is done waiting to be consulted and ready to start writing them.
