Remember the promises made by executives promoting the debut of streaming services? Ten years ago can feel like a lifetime in the age of the internet, but if you try hard, you may recall people in power hailing the rise of streaming as the death of piracy. After all, why would someone steal an album or a movie when they can rent or buy one from the comfort of their own home? Why risk penalty when you can avoid illegal behavior for just a few dollars a month?
If we’ve learned anything in the last decade it’s that piracy won’t be eradicated anytime soon. In fact, since 2008, the amount of media pirated annually has more than doubled. Over hundreds of millions of people use services such as Spotify and Netflix around the world, yet piracy persists. Maybe it always will (we sure hope not).
Anyone claiming piracy is not an issue can now be shown further evidence that it is thanks to a new report from Canadian broadband management company Sandvine. The business, which tracks and studies internet usage, is known for releasing region-specific information regarding internet traffic. Their latest release focuses on the global internet community, and the results are quite surprising.
When all traffic from sources worldwide is combined, Netflix comes out as the clear winner with 13.75% of the total traffic share. The streaming giant is followed by HTTPS Media data (12.25%) and YouTube (10.51%) respectively.
BitTorrent comes in fifth place with 4.10% of all Internet traffic globally, which is mostly driven by the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) regions. BitTorrent is also responsible for roughly 22% of all upstream traffic. That’s nearly ¼ of the total information sent from computers to their network.
By comparison, Netflix accounts for just 15% of all downstream traffic (data received by computers).
“As expected, the top four applications are all video, and also not surprisingly, BitTorrent is fifth overall – strongly boosted by the utter dominance on the upstream in EMEA and APAC,” Sandvine’s Cam Cullen notes.
“This is a pretty significant number since downstream traffic is an order of magnitude larger than the upstream traffic totals worldwide.”
BitTorrent is not as popular in the United States as it once was, but global traffic for the service has been on the rise throughout 2018. There are ongoing arguments at the highest levels of entertainment over how to address the persistence of the service, as well as all other piracy outlets, but no meaningful solution has been found.
For musicians, the best way to prevent piracy is to protect their music with services such as Haulix, which provides secure and customizable digital promotion for talent at all levels of the business. For more information, as well as access to a one-month trial, visit haulix.com today.
