Market fragmentation, increasing subscription prices and an increasingly unfriendly user experience are the main factors pointing to an uptick in unauthorized downloads. Since Netflix began raising rates and banning shared accounts, customers have raised the threat of a return to downloading. Now, for the first time in years, the numbers seem to back them up.
Temporary drop. The emergence of services streaming as Netflix devoured unauthorized downloads. With the promise of a wide and accessible catalog for a fixed rate, the platforms significantly reduced the consumption of movies and series outside of conventional channels. However, the utopia of that completely legal market subject to companies has faded. Recent reports show an uptick in access to this type of content, reversing the trend of the previous decade.
The data. According to the Observatory of Piracy and Digital Content Consumption Habits of 2024, digital piracy in Spain increased by 9% last year, reaching a record figure of 42,782 million euros in value of content defrauded through 7,330 million illegal accesses. In addition, the study indicates that for the first time access to platforms has been recorded through apps, social networks and decoders, growing the aggregate figure even more (an additional 14% compared to the previous year).
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Because? As we pointed out, this rebound is due to a series of circumstances that have changed the outlook for the streaming:
Streaming is no longer convenient. Although perhaps the main reason for the public’s disenchantment with the streaming is that the offer is increasingly dispersed: to access all the relevant content, the user must subscribe to multiple services. The exclusivity strategy that studios use to attract and retain subscribers has broken that ideal convenience of accessing content legally thanks to the streaming. To watch a series with multiple seasons, the user may need to subscribe to different platforms or wait months for the service to change. This dynamic clashes head-on with the immediacy that consumers expect from digital content.
All of this is made worse by the licensing war: each studio wants its own titles on its platform exclusively, and leads to the need to subscribe to very specific platforms to access such popular franchises as Marvel, Star Wars or Stranger Things, for example.
Technically poorer service. In addition to Price and fragmentation, the service offered by some platforms has also worsened, further eroding user loyalty. Many services have reduced the bitrate of their transmissions to save costs, leading to poorer image quality. This loss of quality is often a trigger for users to search for an illegal version that offers a better viewing experience, which makes no theoretical sense: an unauthorized copy of a film often looks and sounds much better than the one available online. streaming.
LUnauthorized downloads have evolved. But in addition, traditional downloads by torrent consumption on websites is now added streaming built outside of unofficial platforms, unauthorized IPTV services and the distribution of content through social networks such as Telegram and WhatsApp. 96% of movie and series consumption in 2023 was done through streaming Unauthorized: you no longer have to download anything, which reduces the risks. It is a very tempting panorama.
Gabe already said it. Specifically in 2011, Gabe Newell said that “piracy is not a price problem, it is a service problem.” Faced with a legal market that is expensive, fragmented and inconvenient, users see unauthorized downloads as a kind of alternative “service” that offers all the content in better quality and for free. It can be said that it is a problem that the industry itself has partly created.
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