In 2011, Reed Hastings was pleased to have reduced the piracy of films and series on the Internet. Seven years later, the optimism of the founder and patron of Netflix is no longer justified. Quite the contrary : according to the canadian firm Sandvine, the illegal downloads are rising again in 2018, even in the United States, where the streaming platform (read without downloading) has more than 57 million subscribers. And new forms of piracy, very popular, have also emerged.
“The production of exclusive content, available on a single service, has never been so important “, underlines Cam Cullen, Sandvine. Between Netflix, HBO, Amazon and Hulu, consumers have to buy multiple subscriptions to see all of it legally – not to mention the cost of cable or satellite. “This is very expensive, so they subscribe to one or two services, and pirating the rest,” says Mr. Cullen. This fragmentation of the offer goes even further, with the upcoming launch of streaming platforms by Disney and Apple.
According to estimates from Sandvine, to be published on Tuesday 2 October, the BitTorrent technology, which allows the sharing of files between users, represented in June, 22 % of the Internet traffic amount in the world. “The trend has reversed,” says Mr. Cullen, who notes that the share of the bandwidth consumed by BitTorrent had fallen sharply since 2011, the date of the first annual report of the firm. However, if the network can be used in a legal way, this is ” negligible “, according to Sandvine.
The catalogue proposed to the international is often less rich
BitTorrent is especially popular in the Europe, Middle East, Africa, where it accounts for more than 31 % of the traffic amount. In Asia-Pacific, this proportion rises to 20 %. But it falls under the 10 % on the american continent. There are several reasons for this gap. Outside of the United States,…
