MUSO’s Global Piracy Insights Report 2016 – Click for more
A report in today’s Torrent Freak noted that content protection firm (anti-piracy) firm Muso recently released its annual Global Piracy Insights Report for 2016 so I was prompted to take a look to see what what’s new on the piracy landscape. According to the report there’s been a, “massive shift towards direct downloads for music content – growing by 31% in 2015” In addition the report found that “28% of all visits to piracy sites in 2015 were through mobile devises, up 8% during the year.”
Viewing habits for pirated movie watchers also seems to have shifted over the past year as more and more users to viewing streamed content instead of downloading torrents. The study examined traffic from 14,000 pirate websites, encompassing 141 billion visits, and according to an analysis of the report on Advanced Television, discovered this trend:
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…the second most popular piracy delivery type was torrents, capturing 17.24 per cent of audience visits.
The report is available to subscribers only so I cannot delve deeper into the figures but I’m not surprised to see streaming gain a growing foothold as the favored viewing platform. Pirates, like the rest of us, have grown accustomed to watching shows streaming on Netflix, HULU and Amazon. It’s no wonder the same patterns persists when watching pirated fare.
For those who care about the impact of piracy on musicians, comes this unfortunate news:
2015 saw a 25% rise in the use of YouTube ripper sites, used primarily for downloading mp3’s from YouTube music videos. The ripper piracy from mobile devices overtook piracy from desktop devices, growing by 46% last year. The usage of these sites is far larger than many realise, in fact making up 17.7% of all visits to piracy sites for music content.
One piece of apparent good news from the report is that, according to MUSO researchers, “…piracy levels remained relatively throughout the year, with a 5% overall decline.”
Andy Chatterley, MUSO CEO ultimately focuses on what can be gained by studying these trends noting the report as helping creators develop a framework by which nudge consumers in better (legal) directions:
This report gives a complete picture of the piracy landscape and identifies key insights into piracy audience and behaviour. The Global Piracy Report is hugely valuable to right holders and for the first time looks at all forms of piracy traffic and not just p2p usage. In understanding the scale and mechanism of the audience we can be better informed to re-connect this audience to legal content.-MuSO press release
The report also found that streaming piracy in both the United States and UK was trending down, “likely to be due to legal music and video streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix.” But, before celebrate too much it also noted that in many countries, streaming piracy is actually increasing. What’s that old saying, two steps forward, one step back?