Piracy Outstripping Legal Video Sales?

b.burl writes to tell us a recently released report by the NDP Group supports the horror stories being fed to us by studio execs, but not quite in the way those execs would have you believe. The study shows a continued rise in video piracy compared to legal video sales. The largest target continues to be adult oriented content and TV shows, with only an estimated 5 percent being mainstream movie content. From the article: "[A]mong U.S. households with members who regularly use the Internet, 8 percent (six million households) downloaded at least one digital video file (10MB or larger) from a P2P service for free in the third quarter of 2006. Nearly 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult-film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content."

Comments

Re:Metrics used are flawed

[rHBa]

As these stats are for the number of downloads not the GBs downloaded, I can, perhaps, see where they come from.

Personally I can't be bothered to download a whole adult movie, a 5 minute clip is usually sufficient. So let's say, for arguments sake, I download four 5 minute (20-50MB) adult movie clips until I have found what I'm looking for, three times a week that's 12 downloads.

I might only download 1 700-1400MB mainstream movie a week and as I know what I'm getting (using imdb.com and vcdquality.com) before I download it I only download it once.

Result:

1 mainstream movie download:12 pr0n downloads

but averaging out the file sizes

~1050MB movie:~420MB pr0n.