The sports streaming service DAZN has appealed to the Italian government to speed up the introduction of stricter rules against audiovisual piracy.
Quoted by Reuters, DAZN’s Italian director Stefano Azzi referred to a new report by the Federation for Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content Industries (FAPAV) and supported legislation “which would enable authorities to block illegal platforms within 30 minutes of initial complaints”.
Broadband TV News that the report, conducted by Ipsos on behalf of FAPAV, says that there were around 345 million acts of illegal pirated audiovisual content in 2022. This was 9%, or 30 million, more than a year earlier.
The increase compared to 2021 was mainly driven by live sport, which recorded a +26% increase in piracy acts in the last year and was the only content that shows an overall growth trend compared to the latest surveys. It was followed by TV programmes, up 20% compared to 2021 and series/fiction, which increased by +15%.
Films are confirmed to be the most pirated content: 35% of audiovisual piracy (over 120 million) concerns films, but the trend, both compared to last year and in the medium term, is decreasing (-4 % vs. 2021; -68% vs. 2016).
The data show that among the methods of using illegal content, digital piracy was confirmed as the main one with 39% incidence, a stable figure compared to the previous year.
Pending the definitive approval of the new law, the awareness of committing a crime among web users is widespread (81% among adult pirates). However, a good half of these do not consider it probable to be discovered and punished.
Consistent with what has been observed in the past, audiovisual content pirates are more concentrated among the under 35s (39% vs 27% of the total population), among those with a higher level of education (21% of university graduates vs 18% of the total population) and among the employed (61% vs 54% of the total population). There is also a slight prevalence of men over women (53% of men and 47% of women).
