Sandvine: TV subscriber fraud is up in US, EU and MENA

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Hot on the heels of its Mobile Internet Phenomena Report, Sandvine has published new research, titled The State of Affairs: A Spotlight on Television and Video Piracy Worldwide.  The latest dataset is from six networks that have a total of 65 million broadband subscribers.  Subscriber fraud ranged from 5.8% in Europe to more than 23% in the Middle East and North Africa.

Image source: Sandvine

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Why it matters

Sandvine’s data comes from the direct measurement of network traffic along multiple criteria, and therefore represents a fact-based view of infringing activity with positive identification.

The report also ranks access to pirate video by device type, with Amazon Fire TV the runaway favorite.  It’s ironic, since Amazon of course hosts its own paid video service, Amazon Prime.  In fact, a search result for “Fire TV Kodi” brings up the Fire TV device alongside books such as “Fire Stick KODI: How to Unlock Your Fire TV Stick Like a Pro & Install KODI in 15 Min. or Less – Includes Screen Shots & Step by Step Tutorial Walk Through.”

Which is it? Does Amazon want to sell hardware and Prime subscriptions, or would they rather make it harder for pirates by policing their book section more diligently?

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