Global piracy shoots up for Oscar nominated movies

SINGAPORE: Irdeto a player in anti piracy and  Revenue Assurance solutions monitored illegal downloads of films in the U.S. and over 200 countries worldwide from January 1 through February 14.

The company revealed that the Academy Awards draws massive consumer interest outside the U.S., evidenced by a 385% increase in piracy worldwide for nominated films following the announcements on January 15.

While Gone Girl was the early front runner after nominations, American Sniper took the lead and is currently the most pirated film in the world post-nomination, according to the data. This global piracy activity can be seen visually in Irdeto’s 2015 Academy Awards Piracy Heat Map.

If the awards were decided based on illegal downloads following the nomination, the category winners on Sunday would have been:

• Best Picture – American Sniper (1,389,819 downloads worldwide since Jan. 15; the top title downloaded in the U.S. as well as over 100 other countries).

• Best Director – Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman (796,697 downloads worldwide since Jan. 15; the #1 downloaded film in both Mexico and Spain).

• Best Actress – Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl (1,252,074 downloads worldwide since Jan. 15).

• Best Actor – Bradley Cooper, American Sniper (1,389,819 downloads worldwide since Jan. 15).

Hollywood screeners specifically accounted for a substantial 31% of the total illegal downloads tracked between January 15 and February 14.

Six nominated movies currently unavailable for retail purchase on Blu-Ray, DVD, VOD or legal streaming/download sites saw the majority of piracy coming directly from these screeners: American Sniper, The Imitation Game, Wild, Selma, Whiplash and Still Alice. While not every illegal download can be considered a lost sale, Irdeto estimates a potential over $40 million in retail revenue that could have been captured for these six titles, if they had been made available to consumers.

Outside of the U.S., the top ten countries that account for the most illegal downloads (totaling over 3 million) are: Russia, Italy, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, India, Australia, Spain, South Korea and the Netherlands. Alternatively, the countries with the highest percentage of piracy per Internet user population were Australia, Italy, Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

While legal video content in various formats is often available in the U.S. sooner than the rest of the world, the combined illegal downloads for California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania still accounted for 5.8% of total global downloads. Some people will always choose to pirate due to cost, convenience and personal preference, even if the viewing quality of the pirated version is inferior to the legal alternative.

Irdeto monitored popular films that were expected to be nominated starting January 1, 2015 in an effort to capture pre-nomination numbers and a predicted spike in activity after nominations. This data was procured through Irdeto's automated crawlers that use proprietary tracking software to identify users and files on the BitTorrent network. A download represents a unique IP address pirating a unique file on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network.