Apple TV+ struggles with burgeoning piracy threat

MacRumors has found that as the popularity of Apple TV+ grows, Apple looks to be struggling to deal with a burgeoning online piracy threat, despite concerted efforts to take down its stolen content.

Hartley Charlton and Sami Fathi for MacRumors:

Apple largely avoided the need to combat online piracy until the launch of ‌Apple TV+‌ in November 2019. Since then, ‌Apple TV+‌ shows and movies have proliferated throughout piracy sites across the internet…
From MacRumors‘ findings, some of Apple’s most popular shows and movies have at least 2,000 active seeders on each major piracy site, going up to as many as approximately 125,000 seeders per title. Download trends broadly map to the popularity of Apple’s various shows and movies, with the likes of “Ted Lasso,” “The Morning Show,” and “SEE” garnering the most downloads.
According to information accessed by MacRumors, Corsearch has issued more than 320,000 DMCA orders to Google, citing copyright infringement for ‌Apple TV+‌ content. These orders only stop Google from indexing flagged piracy sites and do little to curtail the actual hosting of pirated content. Delist requests on Apple’s behalf reached an all-time high on August 16 this year, with more than 8,500 requests to Google in a single day.
MacRumors tracked numerous domains and URLs used to pirate ‌Apple TV+‌ content and found that none were taken down by Apple or its partners over the course of a week. On the contrary, during this period, the website’s catalog of stolen ‌Apple TV+‌ content grew, sometimes within just hours of new episodes being released on ‌Apple TV+‌ itself.

MacDailyNews Take: When you subscribe to a music service you have, for the most part, all of the world’s music for one simple, affordable price. Piracy is way, way down for music versus the early 2000s.
But, for video streaming, if you’d like to watch The Mandalorian, Ted Lasso, The Handmaid’s Tale, Star Trek: Picard, The Crown, etc. you need 5+ separate subscriptions that, when added up, cost too much. So many users subscribe to 1-3 streaming services and go the illegal route to watch the one show they want to watch from another service. Piracy will only increase while there are 20+ streaming services vying for whatever average monthly cost ($30-$40/month?) people are willing to pay for streaming services. Add in the cost of a monthly live TV / cloud DVR service like YouTube TV and you’re easily above what you used to pay for cable TV before you cut the cord.
Yes, it’s wrong to steal. Do not steal content. But, anyone can plainly see why piracy is up on streaming TV series: Too many services that, together, add up to too great a cost.
Maybe someday, we’ll have access to an “Apple TV” service that offers content the way “Apple Music” does, all-you-can-eat for an affordable price. That will quickly cure the piracy problem.
Until then, it’ll be whack-a-mole with torrent sites for Apple, Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Showtime, etc., etc., etc.
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