Sunday, December 31st 2006

Video piracy more common than legitimate video downloads

A recent study by retail analysis group NPD, which consisted of putting tracking software on a group of 12,500 volunteers, has found that video piracy is a lot more common than initially thought. Only 2/10 people downloading video got it from a legitimate source such as Apple, and the other 8/10 downloaded from P2P networks. The study also found that 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were pornographic, 20 percent were television shows and 5 percent were mainstream movie content. There are several good reasons behind the high amount of piracy, however. There is a much larger volume of content available on P2P networks, there are no DRM's to stop someone from converting the video to a different format and/or burning it to DVD, illegal videos are generally of higher quality, and P2P doesn't cost anything.
Source: ARS Technica
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13 Comments on Video piracy more common than legitimate video downloads

#1
Namslas90
Looks as if the majority of the problem is pron freaks, lol. What does that say about people today? Movies was the lowest, meaning most people either copy the download for resale or they don't want to risk getting caught and paying that fine. Funny though a lot of TV shows are free at network sites.
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#2
Jimmy 2004
The number of people buy films in shops probably exceeds piracy though, a couple of years ago there would probably have been no legal downloads.
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#3
Steevo
Generally of higher quality.



So what you are paying for at any pay site isn't really quality, the mediocre bandwidth, the problems with either the player that you HAVE to install (Google Video anyone?), or the DRM.



It is the thought that you won't be one of the millions few of the people getting caught for downloading something that a kid two states over converted on his graphics card and put up on torrent, thus causing a loss supposed loss to the people that made the inferior, harder to use, forced install to slow down your computer thus driving the mainstream consumer to not want to use the internet, shit.


I pity the people who will take this, and who use Iturds and the like really feel that all this "upgrading" to get DRM so involved in their lives is going to make things better.
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#4
mout12
If there was a site to pay for high quality movie downloads in a non-proprietary format, I would.
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#6
b1lk1
I just rent them and "borrow" a copy.
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#7
RickyG512
this news posted will influence more people to download when they read the last few lines, its like a advertisement to download
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#8
tkpenalty
First off why do we need to pay by credit card? The Videos are unbelievably expensive as well and there is a chance of your account getting hijacked.
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#9
zekrahminator
McLovin
RickyG512this news posted will influence more people to download when they read the last few lines, its like a advertisement to download
Oh that's not from personal experience, those results are from the same study of 12,500 volunteers ;). I'm just saying why people would risk breaking the law. In some peoples eyes, there's lots of advantages for pirating, and too many inconveniences for legit downloads. The study I linked to even gave video downloading companies solutions to fix their issues so that people would be more willing to download legally.
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#10
Steevo
I tried Google for some episodes of CSI, and they were piss poor quality, only played on Google Video player, I had problems with the player a few times, and cost $1.99 each for a 20 minute show.


So at that rate I could pay myself $6 a hour to download with better quality off a torrent.



Fucking makes sense to me.
Posted on Reply
#11
WarEagleAU
Bird of Prey
YEah, but Torrent downloads are mostly new movies released. No one really wants to pay for something they can get for free and not get in trouble for. They act like this is news to them.
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#12
Judas
I don't see the point anyways,picture quality is usually quite bad and most time you don't know what your downloading could be some Chinese dubbed version of spiderman, and you only realize that after a 5 hr download
But thats my opinion :)
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