“Piracy will always be part of the model,” Allan McLennan, Managing Director/Global Head of M&E Industry Strategy, PADEM Media Group, said, “but consumption rates will start to decelerate as the benefits of legal choices become more apparent especially now that there are options that are more flexible/economically attractive.”
Awhile back – quite a while – we spent frustrating days divorcing our cable bundle of hundreds of channels (we only watched a few, the rest were just “there.”).
It wasn’t a messy divorce, just tough.
We had begun moving to watching VOD – what we wanted, when we wanted, on the screen we wanted.
Monthly subscriptions with Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ (daughter) and on again/off again relationships with Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount +.
Then there were casual relationships with free with ads services – Tubi, FreeVee (formerly IMDbTV). We’re not proud, free is free and the ads weren’t that bad.
The problem was the subscription costs seemed more frequent than our old Pay TV bill – probably not, but… we moved most of the subscriptions to their lower-cost, ad-supported services and that solved the budget issue
Close to Home – Academics would have you believe that video piracy is greatest “over there.” Unfortunately, the major perpetrators are a little closer to home.
According to Digital TV Research, 67 percent of the pirate sites are hosted in North America and Western Europe with more than 230B folks enjoying their free movies/shows resulting in lost income of $50-$70B last year
The US lost the most to online piracy last year–an estimated $11.6B, thanks to “local” visitors.
Even with all of its surveillance, China came in second, losing an estimated $8.9B last year.
APAC has overtaken North America for the largest region for online piracy totaling nearly $20B in losses.