Iflix Sees Piracy As Its Main Competition

• Iflix, an emerging video streaming service provider, has cited piracy to be much more of a formidable competition to their continued growth.
• The company aspires to do for the film and TV industry, what Spotify has done for the music industry, by becoming a completely legal alternative to piracy.
• The company also tracks piracy behaviors to judge which content a particular locality is most interested in and then licenses their content accordingly. 

Iflix, a video streaming service provider, has built up quite a reputation for itself in multiple emerging markets. However, for its continued growth, the company doesn’t consider the likes of other video streaming services like Netflix and Amazon as much a threat as piracy. In fact, they have cited piracy to be their greatest adversary in this domain.

Iflix's video streaming service has made a foothold in over 25 countries spread across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and boasts a modest user base of 6.5 million subscribers.

The company has expressed their desires to further expand their services, improve their products, and hopes to give the likes of Netflix and Amazon a well-deserved competition. However, as stated by Sherwin dela Cruz, Iflix’s country manager, content pirates are the “big player” who will pose the most competition towards their growth.

Image Courtesy of Inverse

But the man is optimistic about triumphing over content piracy and looks at the music industry as inspiration on how to fight against this pestering problem. He states how Spotify has become a complete alternative to piracy and how they aspire to replicate something similar for the movie and TV industry.

However, it is fascinating to learn that Iflix, even though they see piracy to be their greatest rival, also betters their product and service through indirect help from pirating websites. For example, through the help of TECXIPIO, a German company, Iflix monitors BitTorrent traffic to understand local piracy trends.

This gives them a better understanding of what content a particular locality is most interested in, and hence they can work on a budget by licensing only the contents which the local folks are most interested in.