Today's Pirates Don't Have a Sense of Humor

Drama and Adventure Titles Tracked by Irdeto Account for over 50 Percent of all Digital Marauders’ Illegal Download Activity

SAN JOSE, Calif.(14 Oct 2015)

Irdeto, a world leader in digital platform security, released piracy data that reveals what kind of video content downloaders across the globe want to watch. The peer to peer downloads of the popular movies and TV shows that Irdeto tracks worldwide showed that the top genres were Drama and Adventure.

In the time period from August 2014 to August 2015, Irdeto found that dramatic titles such as House of Cards and Mad Men were the most heavily pirated, with Dramas accounting for 30 percent of the total illegal downloads. Following Drama’s lead, Adventure titles like Black Sails accounted for 26 percent, Crime titles like Homeland at 23 percent, Action titles like Spartacus at 10 percent, Comedy titles like The Big C at 9 percent and Animated at 2 percent of total downloads tracked. Illegal downloads for Horror, Reality and Gameshows accounted for less than a percent of all illegal downloads tracked, respectively¹. All titles tracked by Irdeto were classified by using the Primary Genre on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

“Tracking piracy by genre can help content owners and distributors take advantage of unmet consumer demand and make better decisions about how to package up content and services in different regions. Piracy can inform market strategy for which content to make available, in what regions that content will be well received, how soon to release it and at what price point,” said Rory O’Connor, Vice President, Services, Irdeto.

Geographic Preferences

Irdeto also investigated which regions showed heavy illegal download activity within different genres. The data showed that piracy activity across all genres occurs most often in Brazil, France, Spain, the United States, Russian Federation, Australia, Italy, Canada, UK and the Netherlands, accounting for 56 percent of total downloads worldwide.

Spain accounted for the largest percentage of illegal downloads for titles in the Drama and Crime genres, Russia for the largest percentage of illegal downloads in the Adventure and Action genres, Australia for largest percentage of illegal downloads in the Comedy genre, and the United States for the largest percentage of illegal downloads for titles in the Animated genre – albeit a low percentage overall.

Genre	Top Country Where Genre is Downloaded	Percent of Country’s Total Downloads
1.    Drama	Spain	37%
2.    Adventure	Russia	38%
3.    Crime	Spain	37%
4.    Action	Russia	12%
5.    Comedy	Australia	15%
6.    Animated	United States	4.2%

“The increase in pirated TV content has caused pay TV operators to rethink the way they deliver content. We’re seeing a rise in providers offering online-only options due to customer demand for a la carte content and not wanting to pay for bundled services,” commented O’Connor. “It will be interesting to see how this continues to shape the industry in the next five years as the model shifts to a demand-driven offering.”

Data Collection

Irdeto Consumer Insights are gathered by tracking BitTorrent and peer to peer downloads. Irdeto focuses largely on those services competing for the “additional consumer dollars” beyond basic subscription packages. Piracy data and Irdeto Consumer Insights reports cover the most popular TV shows from pure OTT Operators (like Netflix) vs. Premium Broadcasters (like Showtime) and Broadcasters with syndication deals with the pure OTT Operators. Titles’ main genres were categorized by leveraging data from IMDB. Genre data was weighted to account for the number of titles tracked in each genre, allowing for a fair comparison that focuses on interest, and not the frequency of releases for each genre.

¹ AMC’s The Walking Dead is classified primarily as Drama with Horror as a secondary classification, providing one reason why the Horror genre was ranked lower than expected. 

About Irdeto

At Irdeto, we believe that businesses must have the freedom to innovate and the confidence to take risks to be in control of their future. To help our customers take control, we secure their infrastructure and content and give them the flexibility for the future with a technology-agnostic and service-oriented approach. Irdeto’s powerful solutions and services enable content owners and providers to securely deliver media across all screens and devices in and out of the home, as well as allowing platform operators to offer innovative services beyond media. With over 40 years of expertise in security, we have the market insights from piracy and consumer data, knowhow and proven track record to be the trusted partner of choice. Irdeto’s unique heritage as a subsidiary of multinational media group Naspers (JSE: NPN) means that we are a well-established and reliable partner. Please visit Irdeto at www.irdeto.com.