Piracy: Here to stay?

The more we see piracy evolve the easier it is to blame the ever-growing world of online technology and file sharing. Online streaming has inched its way to becoming the new way to view your favorite shows. Recent films like "The Hunger Games" have prompted piracy because of its easy access to pay-tv streaming on the global scale. Foreign sites that arise on the global platform are often the reason for leaked content, which is the definition of piracy itself. You can check out just exactly why the Lionsgate hit is stirring up so much piracy fear here. 

Networks such as "HBO" are realizing the potential loss that foreign streaming sites threaten and taking action in their own way. The company has agreed to create, easy, low priced, online streaming for the Nordic region. The aim is to reach the viewers of these areas with easy accessible legal content before pirated sites get too out of hand. Its very interesting to see how piracy can overall pressure networks like these into changing its regulatory conditions across the board in terms of its viewers. If piracy wasn't a large issue it would be hard to believe that HBO would make such a gamble by providing a distanced audience with cheap viewing capabilities. 

With these networks desperately adjusting to these new age problems one thing becomes incredibly clear. Piracy on a bigger scale will without a doubt arise as the single biggest threat to television networks. What then does piracy's affect directly have on media such as television? Traditional TV viewing is down, media companies are loosing sight on the behavior of their followers, and commercials are becoming easily avoidable and incredibly unnecessary. To see just how the TV industry is changing check out the article here! 

Torrent freak recently commented on this epidemic, saying, "piracy won’t ever go away". The site instead encourages content holders to come up with broader ways of distribution simply because of the belief that the content will be pirated anyways. Torrent Freak reports on the top watched TV shows being illegally downloaded several MILLION times a week! Of course this means bad news for not only the networks but, for the unseen advertisers that buy expensive airtime. With movies it is the same story. Piracy will never dwindle because everything that major studios charge for is massively overpriced. Therefore there will always be a black market demand for the "cheaper entertainment". If these corporations would like save as much profit on their content as possible they will need to increase cheaper view-ability, and meet the piracy problem halfway.  

It is inevitable. Piracy will stay. However, slowing the rate of piracy is something Internet providers are trying to install by the use of increasing copyright and illegal distribution penalties. New systems are being created to inform targeted copyright infringers of their crime and further punish these "customers" to slow the process of banned sharing. After several notifications the punishments can range from drastically reduced connection speeds to complete blocking of web browsers. With claims that digital piracy costs the United States $16 billion each year it is clear that this is a struggle that proves quite unlikely to end in the near future.