Streaming piracy has fallen steadily over a three-year period, Ampere Analysis has found.
The decrease was particularly sharp in Spain between 2017 and 2019, showing a 45 per cent decline in the use of pirate services, alongside a 47 per cent rise in SVoD viewing over the same period.
Ampere suggested that access to on-demand services alone does not combat piracy; consumers must actually use the services in order for their use of piracy sites to be impacted. SVoD content therefore needs to be appealing for the audience.
“On average, in markets where either catch-up or SVoD online video viewing has risen the most, piracy has experienced the biggest drop,” said Richard Broughton, director at Ampere Analysis. “With the growth in all-you-can-eat legal services, users no longer need to turn to illegitimate sources to get their viewing fix.”
“The on-demand market is moving into a period of ‘siloisation’ where producer and distributor brands go direct to the consumer, at the same time restricting the amount of content they license to third-party services,” he continued. “If the mainstream OTT players have less of the content users want to watch, when they want to watch it, there’s a genuine risk that usage of these SVoD and catch-up services could begin to slump, something the pirate operators will be quick to capitalise on.”
