Streaming video piracy is on the rise again, according to a new study, in apparent response to growing subscription costs for services like Netflix and Disney+ …
Consumers facing steep increases in subscriptions
The past nine months have seen significant increases in streaming video subscriptions, with more to come. Some packages have seen steep price rises, while in other cases companies have introduced ads to their cheapest tiers, forcing consumers to switch to higher-priced packages for a continued ad-free experience.
In December of last year, Disney increased the price of the standard Disney+ tier from $7.99 to $11.99, while simultaneously introducing a replacement $7.99 tier branded as Disney+ Basic, which displays ads.
In terms of ad load, the ads on Disney+ will be 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or 45 seconds long. You can expect up to four minutes of commercials per hour. Disney+ Basic, however, doesn’t support offline viewing because the ads are loaded at the time the content is played.
In June, Netflix started quietly killing its basic plan without ads, after earlier hiding it from new subscribers.
Previously, the now discontinued basic plan without ads was offered at $9.99. This means that customers willing to have an ad-free experience will now have to pay an extra $10.50 at least instead of $4.
Amazon Prime Video is the latest company to join in, offering subscribers a choice of ads or paying an extra $3 per month.
Amazon Prime Video users will see ads on shows and movies from early next year unless they subscribe for an ad-free tier […] Amazon will roll out an ad-free subscription tier for an additional $2.99 per month for the US.
Top comment by Joe Fixit
It's not just the rising costs for me because I just rotate the services and watch all of their content rather than stay subscribed. The reason I would pirate is because of the shady garbage they're pulling with things like their "ad-free" tiers. Take Paramount Plus, for instance. The app experience already complete garbage for a multitude of reasons, but the company thinks that "ad-free" means "we'll just show them our ads" and they cram trailers for their own shows down your throat. It even shows ads when you pause the video and some of the shows show one of their stupid ads right in the middle of the show. Amazon does this to an extent with pre-roll trailers, but you can at least skip them there. I'm not going to give Paramount any more money when they do this. I'll just pirate the shows I want to watch from their service and watch them without the annoyances.
They will all blame the pirates, of course, but they've been tone deaf for years and they just keep pulling the same nonsense in pursuit of infinite growth for their shareholders. The end result will be that most of these streaming services will crash and burn and the studios will go back to licensing the content to the remaining ones again.
But even before these latest hikes, subscription costs were steadily increasing, and it is this trend that appears to have led to growing piracy.
Streaming video piracy increasing in response
Video piracy is highest for TV shows, according to the new report, and reverses a previous decline in illegal downloading and streaming.
The report was published by the European Union, but the phenomenon is unlikely to be limited to Europe.
Data shows that accesses to pirated content per internet user per month for all types of content started at about 11.5 in 2017, reached a minimum of about 5 at the beginning of 2021, and increased to 7 at the end of 2022 […]
The recent increase is mainly due to the growth of TV piracy, which represented 48 % of total aggregated piracy (TV, films, music, software and publications) in 2022 […]
There is some substitution between pirated and legal content. The models have shown that there is an inverse relationship between consumption of legal content and piracy in all domains […]
Low per capita income, a high degree of income inequality, and high youth unemployment are all associated with increased consumption of pirated content.
Photo: Chirayu Trivedi/Unsplash
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments