One day after the launch of Disney+ in November, Piracy Monitor blogged about where Disney’s new Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, was showing up on Torrent sites. The service was launched in the US, Canada and The Netherlands on November 11, and in Australia and New Zealand on November 19.
So we thought we’d see where the torrenting activity is taking place now. For the measurement taken via Google Trends on December 10, 2019, Spain again took first place, followed by 17 other countries before the second two launch markets, Australia and New Zealand, appeared.
Seeing Australia and New Zealand in the top 25 at all was a bit of a surprise, since the barrier to entry (e.g. the price) is low, and consumers can simply subscribe. Canada, NL and the US were much further down, as one might expect, at 28th, 31st, and 43rd respectively.
What this could mean
While it stands to reason that consumers in countries where content has not been released would rank high in demand, the locations of the demand were interesting. Why Spain, for example? Earlier in 2019, the operators of three video Web sites in Spain were acquitted of infringement charges because the sites were sites were legal at the time they began operations.
Perhaps the fact that those sites remain online is interpreted as a license to steal in Spain. But if the original rights-holders succeed in overturning this decision on appeal, the offending sites could be liable to pay them hundreds of millions in lost revenue.
In the end analysis, why torrenting ranks the way it does in those countries or in any others is hard to say. Â And how ’bout St Helena?
