3 Reasons Why Online Piracy Is Increasing In 2022

Streaming services don't want to admit it, but online piracy is increasing once more, and it's their fault.

Digital piracy is rising, and while the common intuition for such is people don't want to pay for content, there's more to it than meets the eye. Many factors can lead to a rise in online piracy.

So, read on for the three key reasons why internet piracy is surging in 2022.

1. Streaming Platforms Are Hiking Prices

You're not alone if you've seen a rise in your monthly streaming subscription bill in recent years. Streaming platforms are increasing their prices. The most notorious example is Netflix which has slowly but steadily increased its subscription prices across the US. In 2022 alone, the streaming giant has added a dollar or two on top of its packages. The cheapest plan now starts at $9.99 from the previous $8.99, while the Standard and Premium plans now cost $15.49 and $19.99, respectively.

Netflix's competitor Hulu also hiked its price in late 2021 on its Live TV package. And Hulu is not the only live TV streaming service to do so. YouTube TV, DirectTV, FuboTV, and Sling TV are examples of other services with price hikes in 2020 or 2021. With price increases, streaming services once thought of as cheaper alternatives to cable TV might not save as much money as before.

Increasing streaming costs come when inflation is sky-high, with everything else costing more than before. It, therefore, seems that people have decided to explore the alternative of pirating content instead.

2. Content Exclusivity and Fragmentation on Streaming Platforms

Streaming services ride on content exclusivity to help attract and retain as many people as possible. Unfortunately, content exclusivity makes it expensive for consumers to watch content, leading to increased content piracy. For example, if you love binge-watching The Office, Stranger Things, and Marvel titles, you have to pay for three streaming services now: NBCUniversal's Peacock, Netflix, and Disney+.

Due to content exclusivity and original programming, there's no longer one streaming service for everything. If you want to watch everything you love, you may have to pay for multiple streaming services. To access the most popular movies and TV shows across different major streaming services, you'd have to pay over $80 a month—that's undoubtedly the same as a monthly cable-TV subscription.

Pair that with the worrying price hike trend, and the burden of paying to stream content becomes unbearable to many. Unless you learn a few tricks for managing your streaming subscriptions, the situation might get out of control. Thanks to the market segmentation, streaming services are becoming just as bad as cable. And this exclusivity is only getting started as more and more broadcasters push for their streaming services.

Additionally, even worse, content on streaming services is not necessarily accessible to every subscriber. A good example is Netflix, where the number of titles you have access to depends on where you live due to complicated content licensing deals. Instead of paying for a VPN to access geo-blocked content, which Netflix is constantly cracking down upon, the rising trend in digital piracy hints that some people are taking an alternative route.

3. The Proliferation of Streaming Services

Many streaming services are available today: Peacock, Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+, Prime Video, and Hulu, to name but a few. These options have made content more readily available than ever before, which is a good thing. Unlike in the past, we've even seen major titles debut on streaming services the same day they premiere in theaters.

While that is applaudable, it makes content easy to harvest. Previously, illegal copies had to be recorded with a hidden camera in theaters, resulting in nothing more than fuzzy quality with background noise.

But with the fast delivery and easy access to streaming services, it's become more accessible than ever for pirates to harvest content. As such, it has become more common to get a high-quality version of a movie or TV show across pirate sites days after the official launch.

And just like the ongoing competition for legal streaming, the easy access to content has also resulted in the rise of a plethora of illegal streaming sites. These sites only make it easier for those without a subscription to access content just as easy as paying subscribers but for free.

Digital Piracy Is Bad for Everyone

While some issues are better solved by streaming services like content exclusivity, digital piracy is terrible for everyone—content creators and consumers alike. First, it reduces content sales via legal channels, which hurts the revenue of content creators. The knock-on effect is content producers are less motivated to invest in high-quality content.

And that affects not only everyone involved in the production industry but also consumers since there will be less or no new high-quality content produced. According to a 2019 research [PDF] by the US Chamber of Commerce's Global Innovation Policy Center, global online piracy costs the US economy around $29.2 billion in lost revenue per year.

That's an astonishing figure that's only set to rise as regular consumers face cost of living increases, stagnant wage growth, and inflation.