58bn streaming piracy visits in 2015
Findings from content protection, data-analytics and piracy audience reconnection solutions provider MUSO reveal that nearly three-quarters of all visits to film and TV specific piracy sites in 2015 used web streaming as their method of consuming illegal content, highlighting a clear piracy audience trend change away from content ‘ownership’ using P2P/Torrents or web downloads
These findings are from MUSO’s Global Film & TV Piracy Market Insight Report 2016, available for over 226 countries and dependent regions, which saw the company analyse global traffic from 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites, comprising of over 141 billion visits to these sites, and across 200m measured devices.
Out of a total 78.49 billion film and television piracy site visits, 73.69 per cent (57.84 billion) were visits to streaming sites, with 72.07 per cent of visits via desktop devices, indicating consumption of infringing video content via mobile devices remains low.
With over 12 per cent (9.86 billion visits) of that global piracy audience from the United States, and with France, Germany and the UK all present in the top 10 countries globally by visits, the report highlights a piracy industry in transition, with strongly varying audience trends across different countries highlighting key opportunities, as well as emerging threats.
MUSO’s annual report found that the second most popular piracy delivery type was torrents, capturing 17.24 per cent of audience visits. Despite this high activity, torrents have seen an overall decrease by 18.98 per cent from the first 6 months visits to the last 6 months visits in 2015. Torrent activity has heavily relied on desktop users (77.1 per cent), yet has seen a trend change throughout 2015 of -18.96 per cent. Mobile activity has seen a similar decrease by 19.02 per cent.
The company also noted that 2015 saw a slight increase from the first six months visits to the last six months visits of mobile download volumes by 4.93 per cent. However, the usage of downloads has been relatively low, compared to torrents and streaming traffic, accounting for 8.38 per cent of piracy visits. 2015 saw only a minor increase in download activity, with a growth of 0.21 per cent from the first six to last six months of the year.
“Piracy audiences are becoming better connected, more tech savvy, and know what they want, which is why so many of them have chosen to stream infringing content, rather than download it illegally,” commented MUSO’s Chief Commercial Officer Christopher Elkins.
“We have a deep understanding on how these audiences are engaging online, in how they’re searching and seeking out new content. Likewise, with rights owners, we’re already seeing so many adopt a really fearless attitude in creating even more compelling and easily accessible digital assets for their local audience to engage with. It’s this approach that piracy can’t compete with,” he declared.
