Research conducted for FAPAV, Italy’s Federation for the Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content, announced the results of two sets of research about video piracy in Italy, conducted by Ipsos. In 2019, piracy in Italy continued to trend downward overall, although sports piracy was up. By comparison, piracy is up dramatically in 2020 so far.
Overall, 2019 video piracy counted for 37% of video content overall, down 2% from 2018. Live sports was 10%, up 2% from the previous year.
In 2019, piracy was estimated to cost the Italian audiovisual industry nearly 600 million euros, plus about 500 million euros damage to the country’s economy and 200 million in lost tax revenues.
What has changed with the pandemic?
The percentage of Italian consumers consuming pirated content during two months of the pandemic was 40%, compared with 35% in all of 2019. The number of piracy acts increased from 69 million during the average quarter in 2019, to 243 million during two months of the pandemic. Ten percent of the incidents were for the first time.
Interestingly, while consumption of pirate streaming almost doubled in two months, compared with all of 2019, most of the growth came from sharing illegal accounts that were already in existence, rather than new streaming accounts.
Access the FAPAV research
Read the FAPAV news release (Translated from Italian by Google Translate)
Download the FAPAV / IPSOS study (PDF, in Italian)
Download the summary presentation (PDF, in Italian)
Why it matters
This is a comprehensive set of research from a premier industry organization in Italy. Its findings are referenced by national governments and NGOs at a country level and by regulators in the European Union.
