SkyTicket, Video Speed: Piracy Prevention or a Quick Byte?

It's that time of the year again, the realistically-probable TV show WestWorld is back with another season that predicts our future and how AI will take over the human race. It's time for some binge watching!

Sky Ticket

Ever since I started searching for WestWorld on Google, I started seeing SkyTicket ads everywhere for WestWorld. I thought I would give it a shot; €4.99 for two months is a good deal to try it out.

I registered for the subscription and started watching the first season for a quick recap. Using an Android TV-based Sony Bravia, the first problem was that Sky Ticket was not available for Android TV. Luckily, my TV has Chromecast built in, so it was possible to cast the video from my phone.

I thought: let's turn on the subtitles, like Netflix, and everything would be cool. But Sky Ticket did not offer subtitles, and you could not add your own from an SRT file. Playing it on a Mac was no better: Sky Ticket used Silverlight, which Chrome did not support, and the video played in poor SD quality.

The Teleprompter

Fed up, I tried a bare-metal approach: a blank two-hour video in VLC with downloaded subtitles overlaid while Sky Ticket played on the television. After a few minutes the subtitles drifted out of sync. Adjusting the sync and trimming the blank video did not solve it.

Changing VLC's playback speed revealed the cause: Sky Ticket's video appeared to be sped up by roughly 1.05×. Comparing an episode shown as 67 minutes on Sky Ticket with its 70-minute IMDb runtime matched that factor.

So what is this?

Why would Sky do that? The speed increase is barely noticeable to a viewer but measurable by a computer. One possibility is fingerprinting: assigning subtly different playback speeds could help identify which customer account leaked a pirated copy.

For example, one account might receive 1.056543× speed while another receives 1.055679×. Both feel like 1.05× to a person, but comparing a leaked copy with the original could reveal the source account.

It may have had a completely different explanation; these were simply my thoughts. Thank you for reading.