Internet piracy of films, television series and music has been completely transformed by the arrival of on-demand services, such as Netflix and Spotify. In fact, they too set out to streaming ! Result: in 2024, piracy is in excellent health.
A sign of the times, the targets of modern hacking have changed a little. Twenty years ago, during the golden age of peer-to-peer networks like the famous BitTorrent protocol, it was television broadcasters, music producers and film studios, mainly Hollywood, who saw their works reproduced at will on the Internet. Today, online platforms are also paying the price. Apple TV+, Disney+, Netflix and other similar services see people preferring to pay less where the distribution of their content is prohibited.
On demand…and live
According to data released by the industry, in 2023 alone, no less than 230 billion digital files will have been illicitly exchanged on the Internet. Films and episodes of television series, above all, but also digital books, video games and software of all kinds. It’s a peak.
This figure alone is enough to strike the imagination, but it’s worse: in Quebec, we have no exact idea of the extent of this phenomenon. From audiovisual producers to book publishers, no one has an exclusively Quebec portrait of the problem.
Live sporting events, which until recently were seen as traditional broadcasters’ last defense against digital, are a prime target for pirates these days.
Before the pandemic, we did not imagine that it would be profitable for Netflix to develop a live streaming offering. This was without taking into account the financial power of the digital giants. For Amazon and Apple, it is not very difficult to pay a few billion to acquire the rights to broadcast professional baseball, football and soccer.
Result: sport can now be watched comfortably on the Internet. And increasingly from an illegal source. Pirated broadcasts of live sporting events attract more Internet users every year. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, so much so that the share of piracy in live sports has increased by 30% per year over the last three years, according to statistics reported by the PDN agency, nicknamed the “Net police”, a Montreal firm specializing in the protection of intellectual property and the removal of sources of online piracy.
Put all this together, PDN calculates that the majority of pirated content viewed by Internet users around the world in 2023 was offered in the form of an on-demand streaming service that simply did not have the legal rights to offer this content. content.
There are plenty of good reasons why pirated content is so popular. The most important, obviously, is the price. Individually, on-demand services cost consumers less than a cable TV subscription. But as they pile up, the bill climbs. Especially if you want to watch sports on the Internet. So there, it costs even more, given that each league and each platform only offers a very thin slice of the pie.
Meanwhile, any unscrupulous Internet user is only a Google search away from finding a pirated source, website, or even a small Android box with a retail price below $200, and for which he will then only have to pay around ten dollars per month to unblock the hundred sports channels it has. Not to mention the directories of films, television series and music that can also be found there.
Not without risks
Budding pirates don’t care much about copyright issues, commercial agreements between multinationals which share regional broadcasting rights and the future of the audiovisual industry.
In any case, in Canada at least, the law does not accuse them of anything. It is the distributors of the pirated content who are illegal. These distributors have no physical presence in the country, and change the Internet address of their operations whenever it is blocked by major Internet service providers. Internet users who consume their content may not realize it, but they also contribute to the proliferation of malware and Internet threats.
According to other industry data, an Internet user who visits a site with pirated content increases their risk of contracting a digitally transmitted disease, whether it is spyware or malware, by 28 times. The Internet user therefore risks having his online activity spied on. Which may include taking note of everything he types on his home computer, including passwords to his bank accounts, Facebook and elsewhere.
Indeed, it is always good to remember that nothing is ever free on the Internet. Not even pirated content, the price of which is not always in money.