Guidance

MPA Content Security Best Practices and Translations

The industry's framework of expected security behaviors and controls, covering daily operations, technical safeguards and access management. Available in multiple languages.

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What this is

The MPA Content Security Best Practices are the film and television industry's shared reference for how pre-release content should be protected. They set out the security behaviors and controls expected of any company that handles unreleased material, covering management processes, physical security, and the technical systems content moves through. They are the industry baseline used by all member content owners and service providers.

The document separates what is expected from what is advised. Best Practices are the baseline: the controls a company handling pre-release content is expected to have in place. Additional Recommendations sit above that baseline — stronger measures suited to higher-risk work, larger operations, or the most sensitive content. Reading the two together tells you both where you need to be and where you could go next.

Trusted Partner Network (TPN) maintains the Best Practices and updates them regularly, working with the studio members who use them. As threats and production workflows change, the controls are revised rather than left to age, so the version published is the one the industry is currently working to.

Every control is mapped to other widely used security frameworks (eg: NIST, ISO etc.). If your organization already works to another standard, the mapping shows which of your existing controls satisfy which Best Practice, so you can reuse the work you have already done instead of starting over. Translations are available so daily responsibilities and technical requirements are understood by every team, wherever they work.

How to use it

  • Read the Best Practices for the areas closest to your work first — the sections on access, content handling and third parties are usually the most relevant starting point.
  • Treat the Best Practices as your baseline and the Additional Recommendations as the next step, not as one undifferentiated list.
  • Use the framework mappings to find the controls you already meet through another standard before assessing anything new.
  • Share the translated version with any team that does not work in English, so requirements are not lost in interpretation.
Keep going

If this one helped, try another.

Consider these suggestions for what to do next. They either address the same gaps, or are logical next steps.

Gap Analysis Find Your Gaps The free TPN Questionnaire measures your current practices against the MPA Content Security Best Practices, giving you a clear picture of your gaps and a route to closing them. Fix itThis quarterOpen → Tells you which fix matters most for you. High-impact Enable MFA Turn on multi-factor authentication for email, file transfer and remote access — one of the most common gaps described in industry security alerts. Fix itThis weekOpen → Start here if you've done nothing else. High-impact Stop account sharing Replace shared and default logins with individual accounts, so activity is traceable to a person and access ends when they do. Fix itThis weekOpen → The other half of the MFA job. High-impact Reduce access Give each person access only to the systems and projects their current work requires, review it when their role changes, and remove it the day they leave. Fix itThis weekOpen → Same afternoon, same admin screen.