There is no doubt that there is a huge confluence of on-demand content streaming services today. 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 create a lot of competition, which would give rise to more competitive prices and an attractive content ecosystem, the three keys to ultimately reducing piracy, but The truth is that the opposite is happening.

According to new information on piracy of multimedia content (series and movies) is increasing in many countries, and this was noted in data shared by UK-based piracy monitoring firm MUSO. According to the report, the first eight months of 2022 saw a surge in traffic to sites dedicated to piracy increased by 21.9% in this country compared to the same period last year, a number that represents a huge increase.

Carrying out a general assessment, for this period in total 141.7 billion visits to websites dedicated to piracy. If we break it down by category, we find that 46.6% of all these visits had the category “TV” as their main target, followed by “publications” with 27.8% and “movies” with 12.4%. If you are wondering why it leads the TV category, the answer is very simple and it has to do with what I told you in the opening paragraph of this article, the fragmentation of content streaming services.

Think about it, a user who pays for a subscription to Netflix for example does not have access to exclusive Amazon Prime content, or HBO content, or content from other competing services. Can this user pay for a subscription to all of them? Is it worth it if you just want to watch a specific series or content and then not use it? I think these questions answer themselves and perfectly explain this reality, this increase in TV content piracy.

Between January and August 2022 The United States was the country that pirated the most content as it represented 10.9% of the total, corresponding to 15,500 million visits to sites 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. Considering the differences in population size, it is “quite an achievement” that France was so close to China.

Interestingly, only 28.4% of pirates had to resort to searching to find the content they were looking for. almost 62% of the traffic was direct, meaning most pirates knew where to go to find the content they were looking for. In my case, I only subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and the truth is that I haven’t felt the need to resort to piracy, maybe because my responsibilities don’t leave me much free time.