Piracy, a menace that has been affecting Indian cinema since a long time and now we are witnessing how the OTT platforms have fallen prey to this. India being a booming market for all the major streaming platforms sees the release of various international series and films that most of the time are exclusively released through the platforms. Along with that, Indians have been producing some of the most path breaking series and movies in the past few years. This is how the OTT has changed the scene for content in today’s age. We now not only have the movies releasing in the theatres but also the web-series and OTT exclusive movies too.
India is a country where the OTT space is still new and learning with each passing mistake. Last year, as the lockdown took over the country people were forced to be inside their house, this led them to get onto these streaming platforms and start watching those that many have been putting aside for a long time. Brand new series started releasing too and most of them saw instant success. Now we may ask, where does piracy come in all of these? Well, most of the time people tend to go through the easier way to watch these web-series and this is where piracy plays its role.
Internationally, last year the Disney+ web series The Mandalorian became the most pirated series, dethroning Game of Thrones. It was followed by shows like Arrow, Westworld, Amazon original The Boys and many others. While for India, web series like Sony LIV’s Scam 1992, Voot’s Asur, MXPlayer’s Ashram, Sushmita Sen’s Arya and Special Ops were some of the shows that were highly pirated.
The piracy has become way easier and accessible for everyone out there because of data sharing apps like Telegram and other apps like Popcorn Time. If the piracy wasn’t an issue these hit shows would have helped the OTT services and other businesses related to it, create more revenue but sadly today piracy itself is the reason why the OTT industry is losing revenues.
Many movies that are released outside the country or see a delay in the release in India are already available through these apps for viewing within hours of its release. People choose the option of piracy when either it hasn’t been released in the particular area yet or subscription plans for OTT platforms are not affordable. Also, other than piracy another factor that has affected the OTT business is the password and profile sharing by groups of individuals. The password sharing culture highly disturbs the subscription system for the streaming platforms, creating major losses.
Piracy pulls these platforms down but the most affected ones of them all are that provide free content and run on an advertisement based viewing system. As when people choose to go pirated content, the one benefit they get is ad free content. YouTube also has played big roles in bringing forward the piracy, but revised laws of copyright has somehow helped in curbing the matter at the moment for YouTube.