Thanks to streaming which allows users to watch as many videos as they like for a fixed monthly price, piracy has gone down somewhat. This led to many believing that streaming is the way to go, which has spawned more streaming platforms. Unfortunately this seems to have had the opposite effect.
According to Sandvine’s Global Inernet Phenomena report (via Motherboard), piracy appears to be back on the rise. The reason? Apparently it is due to the fact that there are too many streaming services and exclusives, meaning that it would be unrealistic for users to subscribe to multiple streaming services just to access a couple of shows, which means that these users are resorting to piracy to access exclusive content.
Sandvine’s Cam Cullen says, “More sources than ever are producing ‘exclusive’ content available on a single streaming or broadcast service—think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryan for Amazon. To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer, so they subscribe to one or two and pirate the rest.”
In a way it is rather ironic as these services were designed to combat piracy and introduce a more affordable way for users to watch content legally. We can only imagine that this problem would be exacerbated by companies such as Disney, who in 2019 will be launching their own streaming platform, which also means that they’ll be pulling their content off existing streaming platforms.
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