Has Streaming Brought Piracy Back?
By Movieguide® Contributor
A new study revealed the shocking rise of piracy, as millions of people turn to illegal streaming rather than paying for a library of content when they only want to watch one show.
While piracy has always been around, the practice lost popularity in the 2010s when streaming offered an affordable alternative to cable while also allowing users to watch the shows and movies of their choice on demand. Unfortunately, as streaming prices have skyrocketed and more services have spread out the popular content, piracy’s popularity has exploded once again.
“[M]arket demands to make streaming services profitable have caused most of their owners to introduce ad-supported tiers and raise prices. Add to that the difficulty in finding a given title that you want to watch — there are many services but no single directory for identifying which service a title is on. This confluence of events has led many consumers back to the use of piracy sites,” attorney Rob Rosenberg, ex-Showtime Networks executive vice president, said last fall.
According to a new study, pirated content receives over 230 billion views per year, costing distributors upwards of $71 billion dollars and studios up to $91 billion per year. Last year, 80% of all pirated content was distributed through illegal streaming sites, with 50% of those views occuring on desktop setups.
The U.S. was the country most guilty of piracy with 17.38 billion visits to piracy websites occurring in America, followed by Russia (14.186 B), India (9.539 B), France (7.339 B) and Turkey (7.335 B). The U.K. also landed in the top 10 countries despite a slew of strong anti-piracy laws.
READ MORE: MPA PLANS TO INTRODUCE NEW ANTI-PIRACY LEGISLATION TO CONGRESS
Movies and TV shows are not the only piece of content suffering from the rise of piracy. The music industry lost 73.9 billion views due to illegal streaming, with the loss of revenue costing the industry an estimated 70,000 jobs. The majority of this activity occurred on mobile devices as a third of all music consumption takes place illegally.
While piracy used to be a young man’s game — with the average demographic being a male aged 16 to 24 —it has recently gained popularity with older audiences. Millennials, in particular, have normalized the activity, and the average age of a pirate is now 25 to 34. Meanwhile books have experienced a major influx of piracy as well, with people aged 30 to 44 most likely to engage in the act.
“People want to watch what they want when they want it, and they don’t want to have to subscribe to 20 different services or pay exorbitant rates to be able to do that,” Gareth Barkin, a media anthropologist and professor at the University of Puget Sound, explained in 2023.
READ MORE: INTERNATIONAL VIDEO PIRACY: A GROWING THREAT AND HOW TO COMBAT IT
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