Full transcript of “Online Piracy Almost Died. Now It's More Popular Than Ever.”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 I saw this article recently about the number of people who are illegally streaming sports in the UK. It's apparently like gone through the roof and it's been described as industrial scale theft according to one industry report. In fact, I wanted to show you a clip from a football match in the UK. [Applause] They're chanting about Amazon Fire Sticks, which have now become the primary method of pirating sports in the UK to the point where fans are openly chanting about how much they love to illegally stream matches at football matches. It's not just sports though because over 3/4 of Gen Z has admitted to paring in movies and TV shows. And
0:47 even in older generations, the rates of parity are still incredibly high. It's a global thing and it's one that's had like an unexpected resurgence in recent years because prior to the pandemic, the number of people who were choosing to pirate content was steadily decreasing. But you can see there's been this quite significant uptick since then. This change is somewhat surprising given that there's been a decadesl long effort to eradicate piracy. And it was one that looked like at some point it would begin to actually bear fruit. Thousands of websites have been shut down, providers have been arrested, and yet the growth still seems to continue. It's not just even sports and media though. The scientific research community is like overwhelmingly in favor of pirating papers and research. What might be even more surprising is that people are not just pirating to get content for free. But people are even willing to pay for
1:33 pirated services in 2025. Just recently, Italian authorities shut down a $3 billion a year pirate TV ring that had 22 million subscribers. That's more than some legitimate subscription services have. Today in the UK, the head of antipiriracy enforcement has openly admitted that you can pirate content and you'll literally be fine. And I think there's a few different stories at play when we try to understand why piracy is having this resurgence. And it depends on which industry you look at, but they are all linked. And I think the best example to start off with has to be like online streaming, cuz that's really where piracy was pioneered. And in fact, if we go back to like the early 2000s, which is when my personal journey with piracy began, the the one thing I do recall about the experience of trying to watch movies for free and trying to get free songs back then, is that it was like a massive pain in the ass. And you
2:20 had to like fight, you know, pop-ups every 2 seconds and not knowing which play button was the real play button and which play button would download some crazy virus onto your computer. It was really difficult. And when legal alternatives like Netflix and Spotify actually came onto the scene, they were pretty gamechanging, right? It wasn't just that they were legal alternatives. They were actually good. They were actually useful. Back then, the options that you had were cable TV subscriptions, things like Sky in the UK, which would set you back like hundreds of dollars if you wanted to watch literally anything. And so getting an alternative that was useful, cheaper, and had a bunch of content on was honestly revolutionary. The trade-off of like potentially destroying the family computer just to download the new Acon tune was no longer worth it when an alternative like Spotify came on the scene. People loved it, but as you know,
3:07 as the way things go, we can't really have [ __ ] these days. And so the steady march towards endification began. If we take a look at this graph, we noticed that the spike, the major spike happened after the pandemic for media streaming at least. It was actually exactly around this time that Disney, HBO, all the big players in media realized that the online streaming thing was actually pretty popular, that people enjoyed Netflix cuz it was a pretty useful service and that it had a lot going for it. And so they all decided to to launch their own competitors. But unfortunately for the consumer, the approach that these companies took, these rival streamers took wasn't the approach that Netflix originally took. It was to compete on something else, not to compete on usability or convenience. They decided to compete on intellectual property. Instead of making you a better
3:54 offer than the competition, they basically decided to make you an offer you can't refuse. By which I mean that you had to go to them if you wanted to watch particular content. you had to sign up for Disney Plus if you wanted to watch a Disney movie. You'd had to sign up for HBO Max if you wanted to watch a HBO movie. And so we quite quickly shifted from a landscape where content was like packaged in one place with one subscription that got you access to basically everything to a place where subscription costs began to rise and rise and rise. Not because of greater access to content, but because of greater siloing of content. We recreated cable TV in like the most annoying way possible. Basically, content has gotten so fragmented that exclusive content is the majority of Netflix's US catalog. And this has forced people to be increasingly selective. On top of that, in order to deal with this increased
4:39 competition, these streamers began to withdraw features that were cornerstones of their culture effectively. Netflix has tweets back in 2017 about how password sharing is a form of of love for a family. And now they've cracked down on password sharing. HBO Max is doing the same thing. And Disney says that over 150 million users are paying for the service and still watching ads, which is insane. We basically got rid of cable TV and then we recreated it on the internet. And when you recreate the same situation that caused parity to emerge the first time, you're going to recreate the same results that you created the first time. I think it is quite telling that music streaming doesn't normally get like half as many complaints, at least from the customer side of things, as video streamers do. But I think if we if we look like more outside of TV, it's
5:25 not just that the services are getting worse and getting more expensive at the same time and that's what's pushing piracy. I think there are there are also a few other dynamics that are at play because people are willing to pay in general for good services, but in some cases they don't even have the option of paying. You might not actually realize this, but one of the most pirated pieces of content in the world is manga. So Japanese like comics and graphic novels. And it's Americans that are largely leading the wave. It's a place where we have a story that's quite independent to the one that we see with like Netflix and Spotify. To understand it, I want to I want to show you quite an iconic quote from Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve. And it really gets to the crux of this problem. So, we don't really worry about piracy. There's misconceptions in the industry about what piracy is. There's assumption that what is piracy? Piracy is about people want to steal stuff from you,
6:11 right? That they don't want to pay any money and they want to get your content. An example where that was really clear is Russia, right? Everybody in the United States knows that Russians are pirates. So there's no point in localizing your game. There's no point in making your product available in Russia cuz all they'll do is pirate it. You know, when the reality is is that the pirates in Russia were actually doing a much better job than the games companies themselves in localizing the product and and making it available. So if I wanted the product and I didn't want to wait 6 months to get the product and if I wanted it in Russian, I was going to have to go to a pirate simply because I couldn't get it any other way. Clearly they're willing to spend money. So from our point of view, what we saw more and more is that piracy is the result of bad service on the part of of
6:57 game companies. So it really is a question of how can you provide the best possible service to your customers and pricing really is one of the less important aspects of that whole equation. People are happy to pay if they're getting what they perceive as as a great product delivered on their terms. This is an example legal option. There's literally no legal alternative to watch or to access the thing you want to watch at home. And it's actually the exact same story that plays out in the world of manga. It can take an incredibly long time for communities outside of Japan to receive a version of the manga in their language. One Piece, for example, took seven years for the first volume to be translated into English. And in that time, the pirates decided to do what the company wouldn't do for them, which was
7:43 to painstakingly translate page by page this manga in order to give it to people who really wanted it. It's not so much that piracy was a way to circumvent the legal method. It's that piracy was the only alternative in the absence of a legal method. It's grown so quickly because there's literally no legal alternative. The pirates are doing what the actual publishers are refusing to do, provide a service that's actually accessible. I never thought I'd say that Milw Wall fans and manga readers have much in common, but they actually both face a very similar problem. If we go back to that clip I showed you at the start of the Milwall FC fans chanting, we actually have a clear example of a of a service problem. If you don't know much about British football, here's a little bit of law. In England, a bunch of prime time football matches are not actually shown on TV. It's a rule that
8:28 was implemented to encourage people to actually physically go to the matches and to support like local teams. However, football is incredibly expensive these days. Season tickets can cost in the thousands and it's beyond what most people can afford. It's a clear case where people want a way to watch the match that's actually affordable, but they've not been offered that solution because tons of the matches are not broadcast on TV anyways. And the alternative of going in person has become prohibitively expensive. And so people have turned to the fire stick, right? It's not necessarily always about like circumventing the law. These dynamics, specifically like access to content is a big reason we see piracy spreading out of just media and into places like research. Nobody becomes a scientific researcher with the plan of
9:14 putting all of their research behind a $60 pay wall. And in fact, the whole point of science is to allow diverse opinions to be put up to the light of critical scrutiny. If you want to see how ridiculous these pay walls and these artificial barriers to access can get, Sihub, which is one of the main websites that people use to pirate scientific content, gets over half a million visitors every day. And Elsa, which is one of the biggest scientific publishers, sued the creator of SciHub and was awarded $15 million in a settlement for it. I was trying to read about this like settlement and I came across an article describing the the court case in nature which is published by another giant publisher and this article right which is like meant to discourage pirating scientific research costs $40 to read for a PDF that's
10:00 supposed to at least implicitly convince you that piracy is unethical and not worth getting involved with and you need to pay $40 for the privilege of reading the antipiriracy article. The people who write the articles don't see the benefit. it goes straight to the publisher. Services seem to have forgotten like a lesson that they had already learned years ago, which is that a comprehensive affordable service is always going to win. And you can only squeeze your consumers so far before they begin to look elsewhere, which is what they've been doing. And people are finally deciding to vote with their wallets and sell the seven C's. While the legitimate options for accessing film, TV, sports, science, manga, literally all kinds of media and information have steadily been getting worse, the pirate options have been
10:45 focusing on improving customer service, on improving the quality of their service, on getting the price down and on making it accessible to people across the world, which you would think that companies that wanted to compete in a market would try to do. They would try to provide a better service. Instead, they've tried to leverage intellectual property rights and force you to subscribe to their service rather than genuinely try and convince you that their service would improve your life in a way that feels mutually beneficial. I want to say it's surprising, but it's really not. Cuz what I feel like we're seeing is a recreation of the dynamics of like the early 2000s when all of these services just fundamentally didn't want to create something that was appealing and instead wanted to create something where you had no choice. And that strategy only has so much staying
11:32 power when there are armies of highly skilled and highly motivated developers who understand that people want something that's affordable, accessible, and useful. And if they can't get that legally, then they'll get it in whatever way they can. People are voting with their wallets, which is the only way that anyone listens. Hey yo, thanks for watching. If you feel like you learned something and you want another way to support the channel that's completely free, please consider joining my Patreon. It is linked in the description below and probably in the corner of the screen somewhere. Um, I'm trying to make an effort to create some community outside of YouTube. And if that sounds like it might be up your street, then head on over. Did I mention it's free? Yes, it's free. Yeah. Come on, click on it. Okay. Okay. Love you. Bye-bye.
