There is no doubt that, today, there is a huge concurrence of on-demand content streaming services. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV+ are some of the most popular, but the list is much longer and includes other big names like HBO and Hulu. We might think that this should generate great competition, which would give rise to more competitive prices and an attractive content ecosystem, three keys that in the end would make it possible to reduce piracy, but The truth is that the opposite is happening.
According to new information, piracy of multimedia content (series and movies) is increasing in many countries, and this has been noted in the data shared by the firm MUSO, based in the United Kingdom and dedicated to monitoring the status of piracy. According to said report, during the first eight months of 2022 the traffic to sites dedicated to piracy increased by 21.9% in that country compared to the same period of the previous year, a figure that represents a huge rise.
Making a general assessment, during that period a total of 141.7 billion visits to websites dedicated to piracy. If we make a division by categories, we realize that 46.6% of all those visits had the «TV» category as their main objective, followed by «publications» with 27.8% and «movies» with 12, 4%. If you wonder why it leads the television category, the answer is very simple, and it is related to what I have told you in the opening paragraph of this article, the fragmentation of streaming content services.
Think about it for a moment, a user who pays for a subscription to Netflix, for example, does not have access to the exclusive content of Amazon Prime, nor to that of HBO, nor to that of other rival services. Can that user pay the subscription to all of them? Is it worth it if you just want to watch a specific series or content and then you will not use it again? I think these questions answer themselves, and perfectly explain this reality, this growth in piracy focused on television content.
Between January and August 2022, The United States was the country that pirated the most content since it represented 10.9% of the total, which is equivalent to 15,500 million visits to pages dedicated to piracy. In second place was Russia with 8.3 billion visits. The rest of the top positions were held by India, China and France with 7.9 billion, 4.7 billion and 4.5 billion views, respectively. Taking into account the differences in population size, it is “quite an achievement” that France has been so close to China.
As a curious fact, only 28.4% of pirates had to resort to search to find the content they were looking for, and almost 62% of the traffic was direct, meaning that most pirates knew where to go to find the content they were looking for. In my case, I am only subscribed to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and the truth is that I have not felt the need to resort to piracy, perhaps because my obligations do not leave me much free time.
