A Piracy-by-Industry data set from UK-based piracy analytics company MUSO for the January to August 2022 period measured 141.7 billion visits to piracy sites for all industries, which was a 21.9% increase over the same period of 2021.
When broken down into individual media Industries, the largest media sector was TV which includes TV, Anime, Live Sports and Live Broadcasts. TV content accounted for 46.6% of all traffic to piracy websites amongst these media sectors, said MUSO.
This MUSO data set measures industry-wide traffic and piracy demand for the film, TV, music, software and publishing sectors across unlicensed streaming, torrent download, web download and stream ripping websites.
Film piracy increased the most
Comparing Jan-Aug data between 2021 and 2022 for each media sector, film piracy traffic grew the most at 49.1%, with TV increasing about 11%. Music saw the lowest increase of 3.87%.
MUSO data ranked piracy traffic for the top 15 countries. The United States was first, at about 15.5 billion infringing visits. At #2, the Russian Federation saw about 8.3 billion visits, followed by India (about 8 billion), China (about 4.7 billion) and France (about 4.5 billion)
Scope of measurement
MUSO measures visits to the entire piracy eco-system for desktop and mobile visits as well as tracking direct piracy consumption on over 388,000 TV and film titles across both the torrent network and unlicensed streaming websites.
Why it matters
MUSO says that the increase in piracy, year-over-year-to-date, has been driven by:
- More content being released following the Covid-19 delay.
- Proliferation of global and regionalised easy to access piracy websites.
- Increased exclusive content behind various VoD platforms.
- Geo-restricted content, where titles are not available in every country.
Global audience demand for media and entertainment content continues to increase and piracy remains an accessible and perhaps preferred method of consumption.
Audience measurement data is critical for optimum enforcement strategies but can also be used to better understand the audience for business intelligence.
