Here’s a surprise. Netflix is offering further proof—if you needed it—that piracy is mostly a phenomenon of the content industry’s own making. Netflix reports that when they enter a new territory, BitTorrent traffic is drastically reduced. This suggests, as we’ve said here many times, that most people are basically honest and will pay for their content when given the opportunity. It’s only when Hollywood refuses to make movies available for streaming or download, that people search it out on pirate sites.
It’s nice to see more verification of this but I’m skeptical that it will make much difference. Hollywood will continue to whine that they can’t make content available because people will pirate it and the cycle will go on and on. Perhaps this study will at least help prevent more moronic legislation although that, too, seems unlikely given that moronic legislation is Washington’s primary product.
One puzzling thing about the article, which has its origin in a story from Stuff, is how Netflix got this data. Netflix says,
“One of the things is we get ISPs to publicise their connection speeds
– and when we launch in a territory the BitTorrent traffic drops as
the Netflix traffic grows.”
That, of course, doesn’t make any sense—unless they’re postulating some relationship between connection speed and a drop off of BitTorrent traffic—so I’m guessing the actual statement got filtered by the entertainment press, which probably doesn’t have much of a grasp on network engineering.