ONE Championship taps Friend MTS to secure global D2C streams
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.
Key Takeaways
- Multi-year agreement covers 24/7 live monitoring across major social media platforms and the open web.
- Initial deployment at ONE SAMURAI 1 successfully removed unauthorized streams that had amassed millions of views.
- Friend MTS is providing the technology to protect ONE’s content in over 195 countries and across all distribution paths.
- The strategy prioritizes protecting global broadcast partnerships alongside ONE’s proprietary D2C streaming service.
Why It Matters
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.
Additional Context
The partnership arrives as ONE Championship significantly scales its global output, with a record 72 events scheduled for 2026, per ONE’s own calendar updates in January 2026. This expansion includes 12 'Fight Night' cards for Amazon Prime Video in U.S. primetime and nearly 50 'Friday Fights' events. To support this volume, ONE recently introduced a tiered paid streaming model for its Friday Fights series, charging roughly 160 baht per month in Thailand for early-card access, according to the Bangkok Post in February 2026. This move into subscription-based content makes the prevention of free, unofficial social media streams a financial necessity rather than a nuisance. Friend MTS has been aggressively expanding its footprint in the APAC region and beyond, recently announcing similar security partnerships with TrueVisions NOW in Thailand and MNC Media in Indonesia, per company releases in June 2026. This growth is fueled by a new AI-driven monitoring model that Friend MTS claims can identify threats 70% faster than previous iterations, as highlighted during IBC 2025. These technological gains are critical as global sports piracy continues to facilitate a symbiotic relationship with unlicensed gambling; a January 2026 report from the Campaign for Fairer Gambling noted that 89% of illegal sports streams in certain markets now feature advertisements for black-market bookmakers.
Read full article at broadcastnow.co.uk