Netflix Is Not Going to Kill Piracy, Research Suggests (torrentfreak.com) 158
Even as more people than ever are tuning to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming services to look, piracy too continues to thrive, a research suggests. An anonymous reader shares a report: Intrigued by this interplay of legal and unauthorized viewing, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Universidade Catolica Portuguesa carried out an extensive study. They partnered with a major telco, which is not named, to analyze if BitTorrent downloading habits can be changed by offering legal alternatives. The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand. To measure the effects of video-on-demand access on piracy, the researchers then monitored the legal viewing activity and BitTorrent transfers of the people who received the free offer, comparing it to a control group. The results show that piracy is harder to beat than some would expect. Subscribers who received the free subscription watched more TV, but overall their torrenting habits didn't change significantly. "We find that, on average, households that received the gift increased overall TV consumption by 4.6% and reduced Internet downloads and uploads by 4.2% and 4.5%, respectively. However, and also on average, treated households did not change their likelihood of using BitTorrent during the experiment," the researchers write.