The Content Delivery & Security Association’s (CDSA) CDSA Summit @ Los Angeles event will be designed to engage as much as enlighten, gathering CDSA Board and member companies along with their colleagues and collaborators to engage in vigorous conversation about the state of content protection and artificial intelligence in the media and entertainment industry.
This year’s theme, “Where Content Protection and AI Converge,” will incorporate the 10-plus years CDSA has produced the annual Content Protection Summit (CPS) event in December into the CDSA Summit agenda.
Here’s a look at what attendees can expect at Google’s Spruce Goose Hangar in Playa Vista on Dec. 9:
• Following opening remarks, Anil Jain, global managing director of strategic consumer industries for Google Cloud, will deliver the opening keynote “Media + Entertainment Trends for 2025s.” What’s next for M&E? How does M&E relate to other industries? In our opening keynote session, we hear from an industry leader whose job it is to predict these trends and build businesses that respond to these technology changes. This presentation sets the stage for the broad conversations being held throughout the day. Good, bad, ugly … we are clearly facing significant changes, but these challenges are where we can all learn, and still win, together.
• Next is “Strength in Community: CDSA’s Working Groups.” CDSA working groups are the heartbeat of our community and they also help shape the culture and membership of the Association. In this “end of year” session we will examine a few groundbreaking collaborations that are designed to increase transparency, drive efficiencies, or solve a common problem within the global entertainment supply chain.
As we explore how these groups foster collaboration, innovation, and engagement among members, driving the association’s mission forward, we will focus specifically on how these working groups form and their individual achievements. You’ll also get a preview into tomorrow’s “Member Day” as our working groups enhance the value proposition for members, strengthen the association’s sense of community, and drive organizational success.
Richard Atkinson, CDSA president and chairman emeritus, moderates, and will be joined on stage with Cyril Abdi, co-chair of the Copyright & Licensing Working Group; Bryan Ellenburg, senior director of content security for Paramount; Nicole Little, security products and partnerships manager for Netflix; Cody Lassiter, director of content security for Paramount; and Mark Nakano, VP of content security for Warner Bros. Discovery.
• Atkinson will then lead the discussion “Business Leader Perspectives on the Values and Risks of AI” with Scott Ehrlich, chief innovation officer for Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Allan McLennan, CEO of PADEM Media Group. While promising profound efficiencies and capabilities to the business, AI also comes with legal, cultural, social, security, and other risks that are far more prevalent with forms of AI than with other, more traditional technology solutions. This session addresses the most critical elements about our transition including the positive aspects of AI, impact of and on risks, and the general leadership elements needed to ensure our industry’s (and humanity’s) success with this emerging technology.
Attendees will then have the option of two tracks of sessions, one at the Airship, one on The Pitch:
AIRSHIP
• “Watermarking: Evolving Our Last Line of Defense” will be hosted by Sharan Reddy, CEO of Indee. Watermarking has been a critical pillar of content protection, serving as the industry’s foremost defense against unauthorized distribution and piracy. Yet, as content creation, consumption, and distribution models evolve, so too must our approaches to safeguarding intellectual property.
This session delves into the present and future of watermarking technology while exploring pressing challenges and groundbreaking solutions. Highlights include detecting leaks in shorter clips and evolving content formats, overcoming the high costs of implementing watermarks for large-scale campaigns and consumer streaming platforms, and seamlessly integrating watermarking into studio-specific workflows and proprietary tools. Join us to discover the next wave of watermarking innovation and how it can rise to meet the demands of modern content protection.
• “Account Takeover: Modernizing the Battlefield” is presented by Rajan Kapoor, field CISO for Material Security. Account Takeovers (ATOs) have surged by 66% since 2021 (Microsoft 2024 Digital Defense Report), driven by more sophisticated and frequent attacks. Why? Cloud productivity suites like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are unique and valuable targets that have corporate data and identity access. These accounts can also be used by attackers to launch further attacks. Yet, many businesses face this escalating threat with outdated tools, leaving critical gaps in visibility and post-breach protection.
It’s clear that safeguarding against ATOs and data loss demands a fresh approach. This session will explore how modern security solutions can find and mitigate the current risks in your cloud environments that could lead to ATO, detect and stop ATO attacks as they are happening, and protect sensitive data at rest — even in the event of a breach. Join us to uncover how you can transform your cloud security strategy to stay ahead of today’s most determined attackers.
• “Secure Collaboration with Workspace and Gemini AI” is led by Jared Iwata, group product manager for Google. The modern “studio” work environment is all about ensuring the security of your collaborative partners. And with the rise of remote work and increased reliance on digital tools, safeguarding your business data has never been more critical. Google Workspace offers a multitude of benefits for both users and organizations by enhancing data security, automating classification processes, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. One of the primary advantages is the ability to automatically and continuously identify, classify, and label sensitive files across the organization using AI classification capabilities. This session will take you through the fundamentals of secure collaboration using Workspace.
THE PITCH
• “Analyzing Threats Across Media & Entertainment” will be presented by Luke McNamara, deputy chief analyst for Google Cloud, with an introduction by Toby Scales, M+E lead, Office of the CISO with Google Cloud. Increasingly, the threat landscape in media & entertainment is shaped by a diversity of threat actors carrying out a range of operations for different ends. While to some extent the proliferation of threat actors and evolution of techniques is not new, the evolution in tactics — and particularly the increased focus of evasion of detection — has made the cyber domain a more complex landscape for defenders. Join us as we look at the global landscape of cyber threats in an era of increased uncertainty, identify the key areas of focus where our industry is under threat, and understand how our community can adapt to respond.
• “Going Beyond IP Geolocation” has James Clark, GM of media and entertainment for GeoComply on the stage. The value of streaming rights is dependent upon where the audience is around the world. Geo-blocking is a well-established means to protect business models across many verticals, especially media and entertainment. With over 1.5B VPN users around the world and over half of them using a VPN to access entertainment content they would otherwise not be able to access from their location, the need for effective control has never been greater. However, with increasingly sophisticated tools to spoof an IP address, the media and entertainment industry needs a more robust solution. GeoComply Core goes beyond IP to determine exactly where a user is and ensure they are not trying to fake their location. Having launched its first streaming client this year, to ‘go beyond IP’, this session will cover this evolution for streaming and the hidden extra benefits device-level data can bring for a streaming platform and their rights owner partners.
• “What Should You Do About That Phishing Email?” will be hosted by Chris Taylor, CEO of Taksati Consulting and director of the ME-ISAC. This session shows what threat data looks like in a real-world incident and how the recipient of shared data can benefit. The presentation gives you an idea what a SOC analyst does when someone hits the ‘report phishing’ button. You’ll see how to analyze a phishing email, extract all the indicators from it, and show how and where those indicators are used to defend a network.
Following a networking luncheon, attendees will again have two tracks to choose from:
AIRSHIP
• Virginia Lyons, SVP and CISO with Sony Pictures Entertainment (interviewed by Guy Finley, CDSA’s executive director) delivers the keynote “Renewing Our Collaboration on Incident Response.” As we move into the next generation of content production and distribution, our industry is faced with incredible uncertainty on how we manage risk and threat mitigation. Core to the evolution of our business is the communication we maintain across all our disparate, and international, colleagues, subcontractors and service providers who hold the front-line in our defense. Incident response is critical to keeping our community safe and, here in the U.S., we have been given unprecedented instructions on how we can communicate with each other. This exclusive fireside chat looks at what we can do as an industry to foster and facilitate increased communication across productions, vendors and your enterprise.
• “New Perspectives: Preventing and Stopping CDN Leaching of Premium Content” will feature Ken Gerstein, VP of NAGRA, Michelle Munson, co-founder and CEO of Eluvio, and Mark Nakano, VP of content security for Warner Bros. Discovery. Content Delivery Network (CDN) leeching is where pirates exploit legitimate infrastructure to steal and redistribute content (without paying for it). By tapping into existing CDN infrastructure, pirates bypass content creation and licensing costs, thus “leeching” stolen content to subscribers at virtually no expense. This panel also discusses details of the joint-working group with CDSA and SVTA to bring new perspectives to a growing problem.
• “Production Identity: Moving from Theory to Practice” will be presented by Cody Lassiter, director of content security for Paramount Global, and Ben Schofield, technical director with CDSA. CDSA’s Production Security Working Group (PSWG), which comprises the identity practice implementers from the major streamers and studios, has focused on developing common best practice for production identity. Their mission has had an immediate impact on helping streamline the onboarding and offboarding of crew and vendors, creating the principles for managing consistent roles and permissions across the most popular stack of applications, and giving control of changes to core media assets through the creative lifecycle. This session provides an update from the content creators who helped drive the proof of concept(s) that will save them millions of dollars a year. This working group is an example of agility and innovation in an area that has historically been a production delay.
• “Strengthening Security: Stakeholder Voices in Action” features Kari Grubin, membership services director with the Trusted Partner Network, Jamie Beth Maragas, COO and global lead compliance assessor for Crafted Compliance, and Rosanna Marino, COO with IDC LA. Discover how stakeholder feedback drives progress and improvement in global content security. This session explores actionable insights and collaborative efforts that enhance the TPN program and our industry’s approach to global content security in an ever-evolving, digital landscape.
THE PITCH
• Lee Kent, content protection manager with BeIN, delivers the keynote “Should We Differentiate Between Content Security and Content Protection?” Standards and industry best practices, who and what. Throughout the content delivery chain, the words standards and best practices are mentioned in conversations and contracts, however, do we understand what they are and as an industry, do we differentiate between content security and content protection?
• “EIDR (and AI) in Content Provenance and Authenticity” will see Hollie Choi, managing director of the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR), on the stage. As AI increasingly becomes an agitator for complexity within contracts, and IP rights are being challenged, this session looks at how our supply chain will adapt and adopt identifiers to integrate AI respectfully for all parties. This session also discusses the various concepts and applications of the EIDR ID in the global entertainment supply chain as it relates to artificial intelligence, content provenance, and authenticity.
• “Language Metadata Table: New API & WordPress Plugin” features Yonah Levenson, founder and chair of the Language Metadata Table, CDSA and DAM Certificate Program co-director, and instructor at Rutgers University, and Jonathan de Armas, owner and solutions architect for Island Pitch
CDSA’s Language Metadata Table (LMT) is now up to 362 languages, with more additions on the horizon. LMT was well received at the recent Languages and the Media conference held in Budapest, highlighting its growing importance in the field. With the advent of improved AI-generated subtitles, dubbing, closed captions, and subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, the need for accurate language codes is more pressing than ever.
LMT continues to be the go-to solution for ensuring precise language metadata.
This session will provide an update on what’s happening with LMT, as well as introduce the new LMT Tools API and LMT Connector WordPress Plugin, which allows users to easily integrate LMT languages into their WordPress pages for consistent and accurate metadata. Stay tuned for what’s next as we continue to expand and enhance LMT’s capabilities.
• The “Device Provisioning Working Group Update” will see Alex Lee, Widevine Partner Engineering with Google, and Prashant Grover, senior staff for Widevine Partner Engineering. The Renewal & Provisioning working group has contributors from across the industry, including Content creators, streaming service providers, DRM providers and IP-technology providers. The group has been meeting bi-weekly for several years with the purpose of understanding how streaming devices can mitigate the risk of content being misused, or services providing that content being abused.
• “Connecting Partners on IP Protection” has CDSA’s Abdi on stage. Join us for an engaging session with a key architect behind the CDSA’s “Spoiler Alert” campaign. This initiative educated companies about preventing IP leaks and safeguarding intellectual property, empowering partners to take proactive measures, seek expert guidance, and foster trust throughout their supply chains. In this session, we’ll dive into the critical role of collaboration between IP holders, creatives, and manufacturers. Discover how connecting the dots ensures your most valuable assets remain secure while paving the way to showcase your content with confidence. It’s not just about protection; it’s about elevating creativity and trust. Don’t miss this opportunity to be inspired and informed!
AIRSHIP
• Following a networking break, attendees will hear from Jerry Rees, Imagineer, director and animator, in the creative keynote “Pushing Boundaries with AI.” This session showcases the cutting-edge advancements shaping the creative landscape of film making, interactive media, and autonomous robots. Our “Creative-in-Residence” again brings his imagination to our stage to unveil his latest work and open our eyes to the creative possibilities of the medium, regardless of the entity that delivers the message! Always an industry pioneer, our Keynote speaker brings a wealth of experience and will again offer a glimpse into the future of creative expression. Join us for an exclusive look at the latest technologies driving autonomy and sentience that are revolutionizing storytelling.
• “AI’s Evolving Impact to IP and Law” will be presented by ioLiberum president Nick Matlach, and GM Evelynn Glausman. As discussed during our CDSA Summits throughout the year, the speed of the development, training, and leveraging of AI is leading many people to raise significant concerns over some of the legal and moral implications of using the technology. As even more questions arise around who owns the rights to the materials which AI engines are being trained on and what is real or fake. As the use of AI or AI/ML derivative technologies becomes increasingly pervasive we need to try to find some answers. This session updates our community on the latest cases, and continues to explore this evolving technology landscape, and provides perspectives on how to weigh up the opportunities vs. the risks.
• The final presentation of the day, “Leaders on their AI Developments,” comes from John Canning, director of developer relations–creators at AMD; Jon Flynn, head of AI, media and entertainment for Google; and CDSA chairman Ben Stanbury. As AI is actively being developed and deployed across our industry, we find ourselves at a familiar crossroads where technology leads new business models and opportunities. This session, featuring 3 leaders from the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and entertainment workflow space, coming from 3 large, international companies, will have an enlightening conversation about what they are doing, seeing, and expecting.
A networking reception will follow closing remarks.
For more information about the CDSA Summit Los Angeles click here. For sponsorship and speaker inquiries, or to inquire about your complimentary CDSA member code, email secretariat@CDSAonline.org.
CDSA Summit @ Los Angeles is presented by Indee, with sponsorship by Google Cloud, Eluvio, GeoComply, Material Security, EIDR, the Tech Align Group, and Vision Media.
