Digital TV Piracy Up, Film Piracy Down in 2017, Muso Says

Digital piracy grew by 1.6 percent in 2017, with visits to video, music, publishing and software piracy sites hitting 300.2 billion, piracy tracking firm Muso said Wednesday. It said pirate sites hosting TV content were most visited, at 106.9 billion, followed by visits to music sites (73.9 billion) and film (53.2 billion). It said the U.S. was the country making the most visits to piracy sites, accounting for 27.9 billion, followed by Russia, India and Brazil. Muso said 53 percent of piracy happens on unlicensed streaming platforms. It said visits to pirate TV content sites were up 3.4 percent worldwide from 2016, and 96.1 percent of those sites make content available via streaming. It said consuming pirated TV content was done primarily via mobile devices, surpassing desktop for the first time. It said visits to pirate film sites was down 2.3 percent year over year, with streaming being the most popular form of consumption, over torrent sites or web download sites.