Nowadays, the digital content industry is experiencing strong growth, bringing high profit value. Digital content and applications also play an important role in IT promotion programs, e-government, computerization as well as the impact on all traditional economic sectors.

Digital contents are very easy to be copied and distributed illegally. This leads to the increasingly serious fight for copyright in digital content and puts enormous pressure on the law of the country to handle the violation as well as resolve arising problems in the relationship between the content owners and offenders.

In the digital environment, we do not merely have to resolve the problem coming from users but also the problems of producers. Statistics show that Vietnam is one of the highest Internet user countries in the world with 50.05 million users,  the number of mobile subscribers reaches 124.7 million with 46 million daily social network users. Digital content disputes become increasingly complexible and it is necessary to have more technological solutions against content piracy on television, as well as on the internet.

 

 

Actions needed to be done before it’s too late!

The piracy situation in the field of television and Internet content copyright infringement are not only causing serious damages to television stations’ revenue but also directly affecting their reputation and brand names, as well as local pay-television service providers. According to 2017 data from VNPAYTV, Vietnam is the country with the lowest average TV revenue per subscriber comparing to other countries in the region. Average revenue per user (ARPU) is about 3 USD in Vietnam, 12 USD in Thailand, 16 USD in Malaysia and 14 USD in Indonedia. The piracy problem has also put pay-TV service providers into the sale price race and forced many companies to bankrupt or stop providing services.

Customers always want to enjoy their favorite content in any formats, at any time and on any devices with the best quality and reasonable prices. From this demand, combining with the development of transmission infrastructure and smart mobile devices, a self-produced and self editorial content trend has emerged. With just a smartphone, an individual can become a "television station" on the internet. However, this spontaneous growth has resulted in the provision of digital content and services in Vietnam falling into uncontrolled content censorship, many malicious contents accidentally or intentionally have been transmitted to a huge amount of members of social networks. The “matrix” of piracy is becoming more and more delicate and popular  because YouTube and Facebook are making profit from advertising on programs, and on freely posted content from their users but they do not take  responsibility in copyright protection. These social networks also have not been controlled or penalized by the laws of the host country.

The encroachment of applications providing cross-border OTT content and the development of global service ecosystems threaten the future of Vietnam digital content services industry which is contributing significantly to the country’s economy, because if the copyright revenue of content production business is not guaranteed and the content of advertising is not controlled, the turnover of content production enterprises and pay-TV companies will not be enough to offset the cost. As a result, users will not have access to high quality and legitimate content sources. It is time for local broadcasters, pay-TV companies, representatives of copyright owners in Vietnam, representatives of advertising media associations need to work together to find a breakthrough solution to stop content piracy on the internet and open the way out for the development of digital content services in Vietnam.

It is necessary to have an ecosystem to minimize the "virus" of copyright infringement

There is a breakthrough solution coming from the combination of companies and units that is operating in the content and pay-TV services sector: Commitment to build and use a Vietnamese solution with features like YouTube to create an Internet content ecosystem of the Vietnamese, built by the Vietnamese and managed by the Vietnamese themselves. One of the leading enterprises in Vietnam in terms of telecommunications and information technology such as Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) can step forward to build the solution.

Owning a broadband and ultra-wideband infrastructure for both mobile and fixed lines, VNPT is capable of developing intelligent ecosystems in content provision and distribution, content sharing, analyzing large customer data (big data), connecting payment systems and service providers deploy simultaneously to tens of millions of available customers.With such a system, manufacturers can provide content to this system, not only ensuring business process but ensuring copyright protection and state management agencies can fully control the content provided by domestic and foreign organizations and individuals on the system owned by Vietnam.

 

 

This is also the optimal solution that Mr. Nguyen Van Tan, Deputy General Director of Media Corporation (VNPT-Media) mentioned in the speech "Cooperation to build the ecosystem of television content on the Internet Vietnam - Smart Media Platform ", at the workshop "Protecting Television Content copywright on the Internet in Vietnam - determination and solution" was organized by Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information (Ministry of Information and Communications)

The Smart Media Platform is a suitable approach and benefits not only to television and content producers but also to service providers or operators. In Vietnam, advertising businesses, e-commerce businesses will also easily connect to the system to deploy business. Smart Media Platform is not only a platform focused on meeting the multi-platform and multi-monitor content delivery requirements, but also the ability to fulfill state management, security data protection and copyright with encryption and data security features … This solution helps to avoid wasting national and corporate resources by concentrating on common infrastructure instead of individual development, and operators will reduce the cost of the hundreds of billions spent on international bandwidth and the revenue of hosting services in the country will also increase dramatically.

With the goal of unity, development cooperation, it is hoped that early links will be formed to create benefits for content businesses, consumers can enjoy high-quality content and protect national interests in all aspects of this field.