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HBO’s post-apocalyptic mushroom-zombie series The Last of Us was easily the network’s most popular show of 2023. It averaged just over 30 million viewers per episode, the largest for any series on HBO/Max since the final season of Game of Thrones in 2019. However, that per-episode average doesn’t fully represent the total number of people who watched The Last of Us. According to research firm Muso, the first season of the show was viewed millions of times more than that, all via unlicensed streams and downloads.
Muso tracks both visits to piracy websites and consumption of various shows and films. For its latest annual report, which it shared with WIRED, the firm tracked 730,000 movies and TV episodes and found that The Last of Us amassed 25 percent of the streams and downloads of the 10 most pirated series of 2023 globally. The next eight entries in that top 10 are anime series, and the tenth slot belongs to Apple TV+’s Silo. (Muso declined to provide specific download numbers, but did indicate that shows and movies on its top ten lists frequently exceed 10 million streams or downloads.)
The Last of Us’ blockbuster year also puts it ahead of last year’s most-pirated show, House of the Dragon, which claimed a 17 percent share of the streams and downloads of the 10 most-pirated series.
Oppenheimer topped the list of most-pirated films on Muso’s list. Barbie came in eighth, so let it be known that when it comes to piracy, Christopher Nolan won the big Barbenheimer face-off. Other movies on the global piracy top 10 include Avatar: The Way of Water, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Piracy is big business. As a report from Bloomberg this week pointed out, illegitimate movie and TV streaming services bring in about $2 billion annually from subscriptions and ads. Some of those services have profit margins close to 90 percent, even as the streaming platforms they’re stealing from struggle with profitability, raise prices, and turn to ad-supported models.
Last year, there were more than 229 billion visits to piracy websites around the world, an increase of 6.7 percent from 2022, a year that saw an even bigger year-over-year jump—18 percent—in piracy. People looking for TV shows account for the largest chunk of those visits—103.9 billion, according to Muso. Film piracy made up 29.6 billion of those visits. Granted, not every visit to a piracy site means something was pilfered, but it’s also possible more than one film or episode could be pirated in a single trip.
I asked Andy Chatterley, Muso’s CEO, whether it had anything to do with the increasing costs and number of streaming services, or perhaps password-sharing crackdowns. He noted that while “subscription fatigue” plays a role, most piracy is driven by access: whether something is available in your area, and whether you can afford it. Public perception is that streaming came along and gave people the option to not pirate, but that’s not entirely the case.
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“The reality is a lot of people have one streaming platform, maybe two, but not all of them,” Chatterley says. “The thing about piracy is, it’s really just people wanting to consume content. They’re not doing it for the act of piracy; they’re being driven by marketing on other things that drive legal consumption.”
Think about The Last of Us. It was a cultural zeitgeist show, but Max isn’t really available outside the US. The show airs in the UK, for example, via Sky, and is available for purchase through Amazon Prime Video and other services, but those can look like obstacles when pirate streams exist. (This also may explain why, even though The Last of Us was also the most pirated show in the US, it only accounted for 19 percent of the streams and downloads in the top 10 shows, rather than 25 percent.)
Shows and movies now jump from service to service at headache-inducing levels, and illegal streaming sites often become the most surefire way to find content. Some of the most-pirated anime shows—Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and others—are available on services like Hulu and Crunchyroll, but for years piracy was the best way to access anime outside of Asia. Also, anime often lands on legal streaming services after its initial airdate in Asia, by which point it’s already been available on the pirate sites.
Muso’s anime numbers, though, show something else, Chatterley says: “the intense demand for this type of content that can only be measured through piracy data, on a worldwide basis, because it’s not widely available legally.”
Movies are a bit different. Demand for them tends to spike shortly after release, after which it falls off. The second half of 2023 showed a 24.6 percent decrease in film piracy compared to the first half—largely, Muso estimates, because there were fewer blockbuster releases in the second half of the year. In this case, even though the films are available in theaters, going to the movies is still too costly for some, so piracy becomes the best option.
More than anything, Muso’s findings show that, despite hopes to the contrary, streaming didn’t stop piracy. Paying for the surfeit of services out there has become almost as expensive as paying for the cable networks that torrenters were trying to get around almost 20 years ago. Piracy is normal now, and shows no signs of slowing down.
