Pirates of The Streaming

Image: The Sidney Morning Herald

The Most of Us

The Last of Us was not only the most viewed TV show of 2023 (averaging 30 million people per episode), but the most pirated series of last year. According to Wired, it constituted 25% of all the 103 billion visits to illegal sites to watch TV series (yes, you read it right, billions).

Stealing the Show

Indeed, the numbers are completely insane. Bloomberg reported that illegitimate services steal about $2 billion per year from ads and subscription services. Note that in 2023 there were a total of 229 billion visits to those websites to watch film and TV alone.  Which means that there is room for a much bigger pirating as we have been seeing a 12% increase in the past couple of years.

Subscription Fatigue

Apparently, the main reason people choose to illegally watch and download content is access. HBO Max, responsible for The Last of Us, for example, is not a worldwide service (mainly present in the Americas and slowly expanding to Europe). The same thing happens with the genre that dominates piracy: Anime. Primarily produced in Japan and slowly distributed outside, fans just don’t want to wait for subtitling or dubbing and rush to websites that carry unofficial translations. The exact same thing happens with K-dramas as soon as they are released in South Korea.

The second reason is economic: people don’t have extra money to sign up for one more streaming service per month. There is a visible subscription fatigue hitting the market, which makes piracy a rather easy way out. 

Piracy Reigns

Last year the Motion Picture Association released a new campaign against piracy by bringing awareness to customers about how exposing their machines to illegal websites is basically inviting fraud in. Deadline explores how piracy leads to more piracy. Now the MPA aims to partner up with Congress in implementing regulations that would prevent websites from hosting pirated content, details on The Verge.

Two-billion-dollar-question

While the act of pirating seems innocent to many people (watching a stream of unlicensed content does not technically constitutes breaking the law, the crime is in downloading or hosting it), it has a direct negative effect in the entertainment industry.  The two-billion-dollar question is: how to effectively fight piracy?

Laura

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