TV content globally accounted for 46.6 percent of all traffic to piracy websites amongst various media sectors and, interestingly, India was placed at No. 3, after the US and the Russian Federation, amongst countries having high incidences of content piracy, according to a new report by data company MUSO.

When broken down into individual media industries, the largest media sector was TV, which includes TV, anime, live sports and live broadcasts, the findings highlighted.

MUSO measured visits to the entire piracy eco-system for desktop and mobile visits as well as tracking direct piracy consumption on over 388,000 TV and film titles across both the torrent network and unlicensed streaming websites, analysing trends observed in industry data set across the first 8 months of 2022 (January to August).

The first eight months of 2022 have revealed some marked trends on MUSO’s Piracy by Industry data, from January to August 2022 when 141.7 billion visits to piracy sites for all industries — signifying a 21.9 percent increase over the same period of 2021— was measured.

According to a blogspot by MUSO, the data set measures industry-wide traffic and piracy demand for the film, TV, music, software and publishing sectors across unlicensed streaming, torrent download, web download and stream ripping websites.

When broken down into individual media industries, TV content accounted for 46.6 percent of all traffic to piracy websites amongst various media sectors.

Looking at a year-on-year comparison from January to August 2022 vs. January to August 2021 for each media sector, MUSO witnessed that piracy has increased in every industry sector with film piracy traffic showing the highest growth by 49.1 percent. Music saw the lowest increase of 3.87 percent.

Analysing the breakdown between delivery methods of unlicensed content, it was seen 53.9 percent of traffic is for unlicensed streaming sites vs. 46.1 percent for download sites (that includes torrents and cyberlockers).

However, while analysing each media sector directly to get a truer picture of delivery trends, it was seen streaming accounts for 95.1 percent of traffic for TV content, whereas downloads accounted for 99 percent of publishing traffic and 100 percent of software piracy traffic.

Viewed by geographic distribution, the MUSO study revealed the United States accounted for 10.9 percent of piracy between Jan-Aug 2022 and is 87.3 percent higher than Russia, which is in second place. The highest European country is France in fifth place, followed by the UK in seventh place. China is placed at the fourth spot, one rung below India.

MUSO Piracy by Industry data revealed deep trends about the piracy ecosystem and is employed by many global governments, trade bodies and Intellectual Property Offices to provide deep insights into the fast changing and dynamic piracy landscape, the company said.

The increase in piracy, measured year on year to date, has been driven by various factors like the following:

# More content being released following the Covid-19 delay.

# Proliferation of global and regionalised easy to access piracy websites.

# Increased exclusive content behind various VoD platforms.

# Geo-restricted content, where titles are not available in every country.

What is clear is global audience demand for media and entertainment content is increasing and piracy remains an accessible and perhaps preferred method of consumption. Audience measurement data is critical for optimum enforcement strategies but can also be used to better understand the audience for business intelligence, the blogspot said.

MUSO is a data company that claims to provide a complete and trusted view of unlicensed media consumption and global piracy demand.