Indians watch stolen films on desktops

More than 68 per cent of the visits Indians made to watch pirated films and TV shows were on a desktop. That is very surprising for a country that experts say is high on mobile data consumption. And more than half of all traffic headed to watch stolen films landed directly at pirate websites. Over 29 per cent came from search and the rest through social media, referrals and other sources.

Those are some of the India findings that London-based Muso shared with Business Standard from its annual study on the state of global piracy, which came out in late July this year. Muso's products focus on anti-piracy, big data/audience insight and direct-to-fan marketing and monetisation. The report analyses global traffic from 14,000 of the largest global piracy sites, which account for more than 141 billion visits in 2015. It looks at data by country, by sources (direct, search engines and social media), by devices and the way it happened - torrent, downloads, streaming etc. The website traffic data is from SimilarWeb which sampled web traffic on over 200 million devices based in more than 226 countries.

The big insights? "Streaming piracy is king. Torrent use is highly reduced but still dominant in some parts of the world. Piracy on mobile devices is slower than we'd expected," said Christopher Elkins, chief commercial officer, Muso.

Globally, almost 74 per cent of the visits to film and TV piracy sites were to streaming sites. More than 72 per cent of these came from desktop devices. So India is quite in line with the global findings.

Incidentally over 12 per cent of the global piracy audience is from the US.