Online video consumption, both in Russia and around the world, continues to grow, making the problem of illegal access to content more and more urgent.

According to MUSO Company, engaged inresearch of global trends of illegal consumption, Russia ranks second in the world (20.6 billion) after United States (53.2 billion) in number of visits to “pirate” sites. According to data for 2017, television content was the most popular among consumers of pirated content (106.9 billion views), which is one third of the total number of visits to sites with pirated content worldwide. Despite a slight decrease in the scale of piracy of film content (by 2.3% in 2017), TV piracy remains an important problem.

According to Andy Chatterley, CEO of MUSO, growing popularity of paid VOD services like Netflix has not led to a reduction in piracy at the global level – moreover, consumption of illegal content is now at its peak. For 2017, the volume of TV content piracy increased by 3.4% compared to 2016. Most views comes on streaming sites (96,1%) and visiting via mobile device (51,92%). Only 5% of all illegal consumption of television content is carried out through torrents.

Special niche is occupied by the consumption of pirated content using illegal set-top boxes, as well as illegal applications for viewing. In particular, Kodi console allows you to search for movies on “pirate” sites, while Google excludes illegal sites from the results of search results. According to research of Sandvine Company, nearly 6% of American households use Kodi console to illegally access movies and television content.

It is also worth noting, “pirated” applications for Smart TV and other devices, available to general public, which allow illegal viewing of video content and terrestrial television.

In Russia, this problem is most relevant in regions. Some regional Internet service providers provide set-top boxes to users that provide access to applications operating as a p2p/sharing network and allowing subscribers to download and view movies and TV series. Solution to this problem requires a set of measures to interact with Internet providers, set-top box manufacturers and TV application stores and remains a promising direction in fight against piracy at the moment.