Few winners in online piracy crackdown

Imagine an industry catering to millions of consumers by allowing them to download in a pretty easy way any programme they want for any device they wish to view it on for basically no cost at all. Well, you can. The only problem is that it’s called piracy.

Piracy in Asia and indeed around the world is a huge problem. In 2014 there was a 45% increase in piracy, with HBO’s Games of Thrones illegally downloaded more than seven million times between 5 February and 6 April this year alone.

Over the past few months it’s been fascinating to watch how content creators have responded to piracy and illegal downloading, taking a more direct and somewhat more aggressive approach.

In early April we saw the producers of Dallas Buyers Club move on illegal downloaders in Australia, a market notorious for piracy, after a Federal Court judge ordered several Australian internet service providers to hand over the identities of thousands of account holders whose internet connections were apparently used to share the movie without authorisation.

More recently, HBO ramped up its sweeping anti-piracy initiative to manage the fallout from the high-profile leak of the first four episodes of Game of Thrones season five, again going directly after the people who illegally downloaded it.

Going directly after the end user is a strategy that has stirred passionate debate on both sides of the fence.

But should pay-TV groups and content creators shoulder some of the blame for not keeping up with the viewing habits of content-hungry consumers? If you look at the big content groups, is what they are doing today very different to what they were doing five or even 10 years ago?

In addition to holding back content, another frustration with pay-TV, particularly in Hong Kong, is that once you are locked into a contract, there is little room to move for at least 24 months.

Even if your favourite programmes or sporting properties disappear from the scheduling, or if services such as HBO start offering OTT services, the flexibility to change just isn’t there.

Last month HBO launched an over-the-top TV service, or OTT, in Hong Kong allowing people to subscribe to its channel without having to commit to a TV package.

It’s these types of moves which the industry needs to start doing to overcome the piracy problems and until major content groups and pay-TV providers can overhaul the way they offer content, people will continue to seek out other means to get the programmes they love – but at what cost?