Stream Guard

Real-time piracy tracking for real-world revenue protection.

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Inspiration

This past spring, I was sitting in my sports management class when the professor asked everyone how they were watching the March Madness games. I was honestly surprised to hear that almost every student was using pirated streaming sites. It got me thinking about the massive amount of revenue these businesses are losing. I talked to my friends about it, and we decided to build something that could help. That’s how we came up with the idea for Stream Guard AI.

What it does

Stream Guard AI is a dashboard that helps sports leagues see exactly how much revenue they are losing to piracy in real-time. Instead of just guessing, companies can use our tool to track specific keywords like "watch champions league free" to see how many people are clicking on illegal links. We show this data through live graphs and report summaries so businesses can see exactly when and where the "leak" is happening.

How we built it

Since we wanted to help companies protect their content, we focused on building a tool that could track streaming sources. We used Python for the backend and worked on integrating APIs that could identify where a stream was originating from.

Challenges we ran into

Because we were a team of mostly beginner coders, we ran into a lot of "rookie" obstacles. The biggest technical challenge was definitely the API integration: it was much harder to track the sources in real-time than we expected. We also struggled a lot with GitHub merge conflicts. Since we were all working on different parts of the project at the same time, we kept overwriting each other's code

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re really proud that we were able to take an idea from a classroom discussion and turn it into a working prototype in just one weekend. Coming from different academic backgrounds, it was a huge win for us to see our different skills actually come together into a functional project.

What we learned

We learned a ton about the technical side of API integration and version control, but the biggest lesson was about collaboration. We realized how important clear communication is when you're working on a deadline.

What's next for Stream Guard

We want to move beyond just tracking data. Our next steps are to add automated takedown requests so companies can report illegal links with one click. We also want to add geographic heatmaps to show which countries have the most piracy, which could help leagues decide where they might need to lower their subscription prices to keep fans watching legally.

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