20 yuan for five years of all network resources, crazy piracy makes the film and television industry cry

This article details the impact of current pirated resources on the film and television industry. If you are also interested in the film and television industry, I recommend reading this article.

It’s unbelievable that pirated products have now evolved to the point where they can compete with genuine products.

On the evening of May 7, the highly anticipated My Altay had just been launched on iQiyi, and pirated resources were posted on the second-hand platform Xianyu. The seller wrote, "3 episodes have been updated, and this post will be updated continuously until the finale." This is not an exception. At the end of last month, the finale of Spring Lovers, starring Li Xian and Zhou Yutong, was screened. Within two hours, the full set of resources was flooding the entire network. Pirated sellers not only started a price war, but also "rolled up" services - buying a pirated copy of Spring Lovers gave away the original novel, tidbits and easter eggs, and even opened a pre-sale link for the unreleased Joy of Life 2, which included the first season resources.

This is the tragedy for all content creators.

At the iQiyi conference last month, founder Gong Yu denounced: "Online piracy has become more serious in the past two years. Works can be searched on major cloud storage within two hours of being released online. Some people are stealing our works and our property." This is also a global problem - in the US market, Parks Associates estimates that video piracy pay TV and OTT providers will lose approximately US$12.5 billion in 2024, an increase of 38% from 2019.

In recent years, the bubble of the film and television industry has been cleared, and high-quality dramas are wonderful. But at this moment when film and television practitioners are pouring their efforts and video platforms are adhering to user value and long-termism, pirated resources have robbed everyone of their deserved returns and made a lot of money without any effort.

01 Live broadcast, online disk, resource package: film and television piracy is making a comeback

Piracy has been around since the birth of film and television content. From videotapes, VCDs, DVDs to websites, network disks and other Internet resources, as technology advances and the media of communication changes, the forms of piracy have also changed and grown accordingly.

As I recall, one of the most impressive "anti-piracy" campaigns was in 2021. Executives from video platforms such as iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video blasted the chaos of piracy at the Internet Audio-Visual Conference, implying that some platforms broadcast HBO's new drama "East Side Nightmares" without approval. As the discussion became louder and louder and the attention became higher, Renren Video, which was operating in the gray area of ​​copyright, was "forced" to take the video offline for rectification. Later, after reflection, Renren Video, which was online, upgraded and changed its name, and transformed into a regular army.

However, piracy has not disappeared. It continues to survive in every corner of the Internet under different guises and sales methods.

For example, some people now conduct guerrilla-style live broadcasts on short video platforms, selling URLs of pirated resources.

After entering the live broadcast room, users are guided to follow the anchor and scan the code to join the group. The group provides the download address of the pirated film and television website. When the group reaches 500 people, the group will be disbanded immediately. Clicking on the purchase link given in the group, you can watch the popular dramas, variety shows, and theater movies on various video platforms at home and abroad for 19.9 yuan. It supports three devices: mobile phones, tablets, and TVs, and can be used continuously for five years. The sales of this entry link alone exceeded 20,000.

What is more common and relatively more popular is to take root on second-hand platforms and sell online disk resources in the form of single-piece payment.

On Xianyu, popular TV series and variety shows such as Pale Fire, Spring for Lovers, Harbin 1944, Riding the Wind 2024, and Flowers and Young Friends are displayed on the counter like discounted clearance items. The completed series are sold in packages, and the unfinished ones are marked according to the rhythm of the main film update, and the post emphasizes "guaranteed completion". Each series is priced between one and two yuan, and is shipped in seconds. According to recent sales records, one account can sell more than a dozen orders a day.

Moreover, the production and distribution of pirated film and television resources has developed into a mature industrial chain: in the production stage, there will be technology to automatically capture new content on video platforms, crack, download, and then package and upload to related websites, with little human involvement. The distribution stage is basically a micro-business-style agent, with a wide coverage, relatively scattered distribution, and "pervasive" way to gain user trust, which has invisibly increased the difficulty of crackdown.

02 Huge profits from small investment, the piracy model is still "iterating"

It is no exaggeration to say that the impact of piracy on the film and television industry is devastating.

The investment in a long video series ranges from a few million to tens of millions. The funds and the hard work of the staff have brought us the wonderful dramas we see today. Without positive income, this thing cannot be sustained for a long time, not to mention the continuous improvement of production standards. I still remember that when the first season of "Celebrating Yu Nian" was broadcast, piracy was rampant and 46 episodes were leaked. The crew could only issue a statement urgently calling for "fighting piracy and overcoming difficulties together."

But in the face of piracy, the appeals of film and television practitioners seem pale and powerless. In those days, pirated discs eroded the box office of Hong Kong movies, forcing the film producers to pay "protection fees" to the pirates and beg them to sell them a few days later.

Today, the arrogance of pirates is even worse. Many pirates not only sell single films, but also set up pirated video websites, collect membership fees and earn advertising fees.

Under the membership model, pirates build pirated websites, gather popular TV series and variety shows from various video platforms, and charge membership fees on a monthly or annual basis, but the price will be lower and the content will be more. Although it is sold cheaply, the huge profits behind it are still surprising because it is zero-cost theft. The American Film Association MPA said that the profit margin of pirated streaming websites myflixer.to and projectfreetv.space is close to 90%.

Under the free model, pirates attract users with free film and television content, and then earn traffic and advertising fees from the black and gray industries.

In 2023, Bill Omar Carasqui, the founder of the pirated streaming website Gears TV, was arrested and nearly $30 million in property was confiscated, including 12 properties, a Lamborghini and $6 million in cash. At its peak, the number of users of this pirated website was only 100,000.

In China, the piracy business is also highly profitable. China's anti-infringement and counterfeiting work network announced that the "First Bullet App" had uploaded a large number of overseas film and television series without authorization, and collected membership recharge fees and advertising fees from them, making a total illegal profit of more than 34.18 million yuan.

03 There is still a long way to go to combat piracy

When the harm of piracy shakes the foundation of the industry, fighting back against piracy is no longer something that can be solved by a single video platform or a single creative team. It requires everyone from top to bottom to participate and find ways to address both the symptoms and the root causes.

Take France as an example. In 2022, the "Law on the Regulation and Protection of Access to Cultural Works in the Digital Age" came into effect. After the implementation of the law, the level of piracy in France began to decline. According to a study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), France ranks low among all countries in Europe in terms of the average number of visitors to pirated websites.

North America has a dedicated anti-piracy team. In 2017, the MPA established the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a law enforcement team consisting of about 100 detectives, which patrols and tracks around the world to help arrest piracy criminals. According to Bloomberg, ACE has helped reduce the number of illegal streaming websites in North America from more than 1,400 in 2018 to 126.

In addition to positive top-down efforts, we also need everyone to respect good content from the bottom of their hearts. People will not eat for free in restaurants, but they can open pirated websites without batting an eyelid. This should not be the phenomenon that should exist with the development of the economy and society today.

The complete elimination of piracy cannot be accomplished overnight, and it requires the participation of everyone to turn the consensus against piracy into action. Only in this way can we return fertile soil to the film and television industry and grow more high-quality content that audiences love.

Author: Zu Yang, WeChat public account: Shen Xiang