One of the main reasons people pirate is because they’d rather not pay for the original item. However there are some people who pirate because it is simply too expensive to pay for single items which is how movies and music have been sold online in the past. However with the arrival of streaming, has piracy taken a bit of a backseat?
According to a recent survey conducted by broadband company Sandvine (via Gizmodo), the results of the survey seems to suggest that yes, piracy appears to have taken a bit of a backseat thanks largely to video streaming services such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video, Hulu, and more.
As you can see in the table above, it shows that Netflix actually accounted for 37.05% of downstreams, with YouTube coming in second place at 17.85%. As for BitTorrent, it was sitting at 2.67% which is way, way below Netflix and YouTube. Of course not all BitTorrents are piracy-related, but one cannot help but draw those associations as that’s what torrents seem to be largely used for these days.
HTTP was also found to account for 6.06% of downstreams, and given that online storage services like Mega have been used in the past to host pirated files, we suppose it is possible that the HTTP downstreams could have been used to download illegal files. However at the end of the day, Netflix is still clearly in the lead. So, do you agree that services like Netflix could have helped to curb piracy?
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