A new report says that nearly three-quarters of all visits to film & 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, now available for over 226 countries and dependent regions. The report analyzed global traffic from 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites, and more than 141 billion visits to these sites, and across 200 million measured devices.
Out of a total 78.49 billion film and television piracy site visits, 73.69 percent (57.84 billion) were visits to streaming sites, with 72.07 percent of visits via desktop devices, indicating consumption of infringing video content via mobile devices remains low. With more than 12 percent (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 percent of audience visits. Despite this high activity, torrents have seen an overall decrease by 18.98 percent from the first six months visits to the last six months visits in 2015. Torrent activity has heavily relied on desktop users (77.1 percent), yet has seen a trend change throughout 2015 of -18.96 percent. Mobile activity has seen a similar decrease by 19.02 percent.
The report also indicates 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 percent. However, the usage of downloads has been relatively low, compared to torrents and streaming traffic, accounting for 8.38 percent of piracy visits. 2015 saw only a minor increase in download activity, with a growth of 0.21 percent from the first six to last six months of the year.