Professional pirates rely on HDCP stripper devices to set up their piracy ecosystem operations. Not only can they feed the pirated  content to origin servers for distribution of live streaming, but there is next to no loss in quality compared to the legitimate service. 

These illegal services organize the content into multi-language presentations, allowing them to reach an international audience. They add features and use interactive communications between clients and services to gain insights into device usage, and the popularity of their content offerings.

Another technique involves obscuring the source identity through direct penetration of the distributor’s client app. In such cases, the watermark remains intact but becomes associated with a phony ID.