How OTTs are giving way to torrents and piracy, once again?
[311 words, 55 second read]
With no single place to consume content, dozens of OTT platforms compete while piracy increasingly takes away from the pie. Let's take a look at the timeline of events.
Late 90s: Content creation was dominated by large production houses like Universal & Disney. There was no place to get all the content at the sample place. Cable TV was expensive, you had to pay extra for every new channel you added, and the content wasn't on-demand.
2005: YouTube came in with free community-generated on-demand content, but long-term entertainment remained in the hands of the production houses.
2007: Netflix came in with on-demand content from (most) production houses. The offering was half the price of cable.
2010s: Netflix became the cable cutter. In 2017, It passed a subscriber count of 50 million in the US, surpassing cable TV. The production houses noticed & set up their own streaming platforms. New entrants like Amazon also got into the OTT space.
2021: The OTT space was crowded with players like Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, ALTt, MLB, Disney Hostar, and dozens of others. Once again, there was no place to get all the content at the sample place.
With customers frustrated by rising subscription prices, multiple subscriptions to handle, and the crackdown on password sharing, the disruptors (streaming services) were set to be disrupted.
This time, the disruptor looks like an old one - torrenting and piracy. Piracy grew by 16% in 2021. Today, pirated video material gets over 230 billion views a year, costs the movie industry over US$40 billion every year, and 80% of all piracy is attributed to illegal video streaming services.
Unless we have a centralized way to consume content, it appears like illegal consumption is set to increase. While there has been some bundling of multiple streaming services along with internet packages, a wide solution is yet to be found.
Author:
Suyash Gupta
BITSoM (BITS Pilani) MBA - Class of '24 | TATA Consumer Products | Aditya Birla Capital | DigiLocker (Gov. of India)
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/suyash-gupta01/
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