Pirate IPTV Subscribers Now Take 5% Of the Entire IPTV Market in the USA & Canada

• Pirate IPTV number of subscribers grow significantly year-over-year.
• Urban areas show denser subscription rates, wheres lower subscriber percentages are found in the countryside.
• IPTV services continue to grow into the largest piece of the pirated content pie in spite of lawsuit actions.

According to the data of a recent report that was published by Sandvine, about 5.5% of the total population of the US and Canada are subscribers of illegal IPTV services. The findings of the report detail that the access to these services is typically achieved through the use of streaming boxes, while the popularity of pirate IPTV rises as we go into denser urban areas.

Sandvine, who is a Canadian broadband management company, has conducted the same research last year, which highlighted the amazingly quick growth that illicit media streaming services enjoyed in the two countries. However, last year’s data was limited to only a million people living in urban areas, wheres this year Sandvine used a broader and much more diverse part of the general population.

The comparison of the data shows that high-density urban areas have had a rise from 6.5% to about 7.3%. Sandvine monitored 19.3 million people in 16 states/provinces in the US and Canada for a period of 30 days, so the percentage of 5.5% corresponds to about a million confirmed IPTV subscribers.

Image Credits: Sandvine.com

The traffic generated by so many IPTV boxes has long surpassed that of BitTorrent, as the convenience and premium feel that the subscribers of these services have created an evolutionary vehicle for pirating content. Most don’t even have to configure anything as the boxes that they buy come pre-configured for streaming from relevant sites. In many cases, the cost of the subscription services is bundled in the box purchase, so they are getting it with a one-year subscription. All this has simplified the process of getting on-demand access to pirated content, thus more and more households are canceling their expensive cable subscriptions in favor of illegitimate IPTV services.

With IPTV services having such a huge piece in the piracy pie, copyright holders are trying to find ways to bash them, so for now, the targets are the providers who are called to pay many millions in damages. As things gradually get out of hand though, and as IPTV service providers swarm, it is quite likely that box sellers and even subscribers will also start to receive official complaints from copyright holders that will bring them in court.

Do you believe that IPTV services can be stopped any time soon? Let us know in the comments below, and don’t forget to like and share this story through our Twitter and Facebook socials.