Without a doubt piracy affects the amount of money movie studios and record labels make. After all some people would much rather stream or download illegally than to pay full price for a show they might only watch once. That being said, is there a particular service or medium that is causing operators grief?
In the case of Netflix, it seems that the issue here is Popcorn Time. For those unfamiliar, Popcorn Time is an online service that allows users to stream the torrents they download instead of having to wait for the entire download to complete before watching in. In some ways some have compared its services to the pirated version of Netflix.
Netflix highlighted this issue in their latest letter to shareholders in which they shared this “sobering” trend that is taking place in the Netherlands. Netflix even shared the graph which you can see in the image above which shows that searches for Popcorn Time in the Netherlands is almost on par with that for searches for Netflix.
In fact Popcorn Time searches are even higher than that of HBO in the country. A report from TorrentFreak also revealed that the app is a huge hit in the Netherlands where it has been downloaded 1.3 million times, making it the second-largest market. However it should be noted that the Netherlands is an exceptional case as in other markets, Netflix is much more popular than Popcorn Time, but it’s still a somewhat worrying trend.
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