TV Producers Lose Billions to Piracy

In case you ever wondered how big the economic damage that file sharing inflicts on the entertainment industry actually is, here’s a hint: apparently it’s big!

According to a study released by Tru Optik, a company that specializes on monetization of digital media, over $800 billion worth of English-language content was shared on peer-to-peer networks in 2014 alone. According to the report, the software industry was hit the hardest by file sharing with $650 billion of what Tru Optik calls “unmonetized demand”, i.e. the market value of content exchanged on peer-to-peer networks.

The TV industry missed out on $18.14 billion in potential revenue as episodes or entire seasons of popular TV shows were downloaded hundreds of millions of times via BitTorrent or similar P2P networks. The chart below illustrates which shows were particularly popular among file-sharers in 2014.