Martial arts organization ONE Championship has partnered with security vendor Friend MTS for global social media anti-piracy protection. Under the multi-year agreement, Friend MTS will provide 24/7 live monitoring and post-event enforcement across social platforms and the open web to protect ONE's D2C streaming and broadcast distribution. The deployment launched during the ONE SAMURAI 1 event, successfully identifying and taking down unauthorized streams globally.
Live sports remains hit hardest by 'recasting' piracy, where streams are illicitly mirrored to social media during peak viewership windows. By outsourcing 24/7 enforcement to Friend MTS, ONE Championship is fortifying its hybrid distribution model, ensuring that its D2C platform and broadcast partners maintain exclusive access to live audiences. This reflects a broader industry shift toward automated, real-time takedowns as rights holders move away from passive protection strategies. For the ecosystem, this partnership demonstrates that scaling a global sports brand now requires a security stack capable of handling simultaneous, massive spikes in IP theft. Watch for whether ONE integrates Friend MTS’s subscriber-level watermarking to identify the specific originating accounts of illegal feeds.
Friend MTS has built a substantial portfolio of live sports rights holders over two decades in content protection. The company was appointed by UEFA in 2022 to provide anti-piracy services across all major UEFA competitions including both club and national team events, covering monitoring and enforcement worldwide. UEFA joined existing Friend MTS customers that include the FA Premier League, Lega Serie A, TNT Sports Chile, and Argentina Football, establishing the vendor as a specialist in protecting high-value live sports content at scale. This track record with major European and Latin American football bodies provides context for why ONE Championship selected Friend MTS for its global social media protection needs.
The ONE Championship partnership represents Friend MTS's expansion into combat sports and the Asia-Pacific market, where piracy rates for live events remain particularly high. Friend MTS CEO Shane McCarthy noted that for APAC live sports rights holders building global audiences, social media is one of the key piracy vectors, emphasizing that live combat sports demand the fastest possible enforcement on social media and the open web. The deal launched during ONE SAMURAI 1 on April 29, 2026, described as the largest event in the organization's history, where Friend MTS identified and removed unauthorized streams amassing millions of views across social platforms and the open web.
Friend MTS operates the FMTS Platform, which consolidates monitoring, watermarking, social media enforcement, blocking, intelligence, and analytics into a single connected system. The platform processes 26,000 hours of content daily and draws on 25 years of verified piracy data, with AI trained on what the company describes as the deepest verified piracy dataset in the industry. For ONE Championship, this unified approach means that takedowns, watermark extractions, and ISP-level blocking can be coordinated from a single interface rather than managed through disconnected tools, which is critical for a rights holder operating across 195 countries with simultaneous broadcast and D2C distribution.
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