United Media’s leading brands – Sport Klub and Nova will continue to be protected from piracy this year by Friend MTS, a leading provider of services to combat content piracy.

Friend MTS is the biggest state of the art anti-piracy system from Great Britain which has been working successfully with big global media such as Sky, BT, UFC and others.

United Media, which owns four national TV stations and more than 25 cable channels in the region, worked with the British company last year and has now signed a new contract to continue cooperation.

“Our sports channels, including Sport Klub 1, SK2, SK3, SK4 and Sport Klub HD will be protected this year by the automated content protection system offered by Friend MTS. The protection will also extend to the key sports events aired on the Nova, Nova S, Nova M and Nova BH channels,” United Media Content Security team manager Dusko Martic said.

“United Media is very pro-active in protecting its own and partner content and our internal Anti-Piracy Team works closely with Friend MTS to protect our channels and content, primarily the sports events that draw great attention here such as UEFA games,” he said.

Friend MTS Regional Vice-President for Europe, the Middle East and Africe Simon Hanna said that joint efforts by content owners, broadcasters and distributors are crucial to prevent content theft given the evident rise in streaming piracy which has a direct effect on income and users in the entertainment industry.

Streaming piracy can be countered effectively only through joint efforts and in close cooperation between technical teams, he said.

United Media, along with SBB, Telemach in Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro , Total TV, Net TV Plus and United Cloud is part of the United Grupe, the leading telecommunications and media platform in southeastern Europe.

N1 TV is part of the United Media company.