SipRadius – Taking Control: Protecting Content in the IP Era
Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist, SipRadius
The move to IP-based infrastructures has unlocked extraordinary flexibility for broadcasters and content owners. Using data circuits, including the public internet, enables distributed workflows that are agile, affordable, and scalable.
Traditional broadcast facilities centered everything around a secure, climate-controlled machine room. Access was strictly limited, and the physical boundary itself provided protection. Today, with software-defined architectures, production resources can be anywhere: in a data center, at a remote location, or in the cloud. That agility comes at a cost, because the physical barriers are gone but often not replaced with equally rigorous digital protections.
The result is a growing security gap. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Cybersecurity Outlook reported that 35% of small organizations (the size of many media companies) consider their cyber resilience inadequate. That figure reflects a widening gulf between the protections deployed by large enterprises and the often minimal practices of smaller businesses. Media companies cannot assume they are exempt. High-value content and live broadcasts make them an obvious target.
The Real Threats
The risks are not theoretical. Ransomware has paralyzed global retailers and public institutions. Imagine a similar attack minutes before the Super Bowl or a World Cup final, locking your control room and demanding cryptocurrency. Or consider a distributed denial of service attack wiping out contribution feeds mid-event. Beyond extortion, hijacked streams could replace programming with propaganda, creating both reputational and political consequences.
A breach of a streaming system rarely stops at the video. Attackers may find pathways into wider IT systems, exposing personal data, financial information, or business plans. The cost goes far beyond the immediate disruption to transmission.
Beyond Protocols
It is tempting to believe that choosing the right transport protocol solves the problem. Standards such as RIST, HLS, DASH, and WebRTC all include encryption and authentication. This is a strong foundation, but not the whole picture. Security must be audited end to end, because an unpatched encoder or weak login can undermine even the strongest encryption.
Every device in the chain has its own operating system, often a general-purpose Linux build. Unless updates and patches are managed, vulnerabilities creep in. Some professional encoders have been found storing passwords in the clear or leaving maintenance backdoors wide open. Compact devices designed for remote productions can also be misplaced, giving attackers time to extract routing data and access credentials.
Human Factors
Technology is only half the battle. People introduce their own risks: weak passwords, reuse across devices, or poorly managed privileges. A talkback operator should never be able to reconfigure routing tables, but without role-based access, this can happen. On the move, crews may overlook an encoder in a flypack, leaving a security hole as damaging as a missed firewall rule.
Communications and Control
Beyond the content itself, intercom, messaging, and file sharing introduce additional vulnerabilities. An IP address or password sent in plain text on a consumer app instantly negates the encryption around video streams. Platforms like Zoom or Teams add further exposure, storing conversations and files on external servers outside your control. Control circuits also deserve scrutiny, as remote access to camera settings or sound consoles could derail a broadcast.
Taking Back Control
The principle that underpins modern security is zero trust: never assume a device or user should be trusted simply because it sits inside your network. Every endpoint must be authenticated and the chain continually tested.
Private cloud strengthens this approach by giving organizations sovereignty over their infrastructure. Unlike public cloud services, it keeps media, communications, and enterprise tools within a self-hosted environment, encrypted end to end and protected by controlled access. With servers, firewalls, VPNs, and redundancy managed on your own terms, the attack surface is minimized.
In practice, private cloud places the entire media and IT environment inside a secure framework that can be hosted anywhere and scaled as needed. For broadcasters and content owners, it unifies security across content, communication, and collaboration.
Practical Lessons from the Field
The theory is clear, but practice makes the point. One major media group, for example, needed to share content seamlessly across hubs in multiple cities, with editors and executives accessing live and archived feeds from anywhere. Security was embedded into the servers themselves, with content distributed through secure nodes so that streams were never exposed to unnecessary decryption points.
At large sporting events, dozens of commentary positions often require ultra-low latency access to live feeds. Secure devices have enabled rights holders to receive synchronized content without risk of piracy.
These two projects highlight a truth: resilience and security are not barriers to flexibility. With the right design, secure networks can be just as agile as insecure ones, and far more reliable.
The Way Forward
Securing streaming and IP-based media is not about ticking boxes on encryption standards. It is about recognizing that every component, every login, every update, and every process can be a potential weak link. Effective protection requires a complete audit of the chain, strong password and privilege management, physical security for devices, communications and control wrapped in the same model as the video, and a zero trust mindset tested continuously.
The industry has been fortunate so far. There have been incidents, but not yet the catastrophic event that knocks a global broadcast offline or leaks unreleased content to the world. That fortune will not last. A determined cyberattack on a media enterprise could cause financial ruin, reputational collapse, or worse.
The solution is not to retreat from IP, but to take its risks as seriously as its opportunities. By embedding security at every layer – from transport protocols to private cloud infrastructure, from human processes to physical devices – we can protect both our content and our businesses. If streaming and media over IP are to continue driving the industry forward, we must ensure there are no weak links.
