Muso Reports Film Piracy Declines While TV and Music Piracy Rises

• Muso, an antipiracy consulting firm releases data which shows piracy activities are still rising.
• TV show piracy and music piracy have increased drastically in 2017, however, film piracy has seen a modest decrease.
• Users on mobile devices do most of the piracy activities.

Muso, an antipiracy consulting firm shows data indicating that piracy activities were much higher in 2017 compared to 2016, despite the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Spotify. According to their data, the last year saw around 300 billion visits to piracy websites which is 1.6% more than that of the previous year. However, the data reflected that illegal streaming and downloads only increased in concern to TV shows and music, whereas film piracy actually saw a decline.

From Muso’s analysis, we get that TV piracy websites got over 106.9 billion visits in the last year, closely followed by music piracy at 73.9 billion, and finally movies which accounted for about 53.2 billion.

Image Courtesy of IBTimes UK

Measuring piracy based on the number of visits made to a piracy website, Muso found that TV piracy saw a global growth of around 3.4% in 2017. Music piracy also jumped to a 14.7% increase even though stream-ripper sites and platforms like youtube-mp3.org got shut down. Now as mentioned, Film piracy did decrease and was down by 2.3% when compared to figures from 2016.

The firm also disclosed that over 53% of the piracy activities took place on unlicensed streaming platforms, indicating that streaming is the preferred medium for entertainment consumption. They also noted that piracy activity was highest in the US with 94% of TV and 77% of movies being pirated by users.

“It has become clear that streaming is the most popular way for consumers to access content, whether it be via legitimate channels or illegitimate ones,” commented Andy Chatterley, CEO of Muso. “Our data suggest that piracy is more popular than ever.”

Again, towards the end of 2017, torrent-based piracy did saw a resurrection. The firm is speculating the shift to peer-to-peer downloads (what torrent uses) might be due to streaming sites getting blocked or shut down.

Finally, according to their data, mobile devices account for 87% of all piracy activities whereas desktop PCs are used in the remaining 13% of the cases.