Advanced Television

UK pirate downloads up 30%?

July 7, 2011

The number of illegally downloaded films in the UK has gone up nearly 30 per cent in five years, claim consultancy firm Envisional. They say their monitoring indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.

The film industry say it is costing £170 million every year and putting thousands of jobs at risk. The research also shows a big rise in TV shows being pirated online. Dr David Price who conducted the research and said there are four main reasons for the increase: increases in broadband speed, easier to find content, a generation online now who aren’t really bothered about downloading things illegally, availability – there’s a lot of American content which a lot of people are desperate to download that they can’t get hold of legitimately.

Price says one of the best ideas available to content producers is to compete with the pirates.”They need to compete with piracy and get their content out there themselves as easily and as quickly and as cheaply as possible,” he said.

Categories: Articles, Content, Piracy