Legal streaming rises 10% in UK

The research showed that while British and Australian users consumed online media at similar rates – illegal downloading for UK consumers was half the rate of their Australian counterparts.

The UK has seen a more than 10 percent increase in take-up of legal streaming and downloading services since 2013, according to a survey published by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO). Here, 25% of users were found to have accessed some content illegally.

The findings showed that the average quarterly spend on downloading and streaming content ranged from £6.68 for TV programmes to £20.28 for music.

However, for millions of people the temptation to illegally download new episodes of Game of Thrones or hit songs by Hozier or Ellie Goulding is still proving too much. BBC iPlayer, YouTube and ITV Player are the most popular platforms for accessing television programmes, with BBC iPlayer in the lead with 62% of all activity, while 21% of users downloading TV content or streaming it illegally. These figures are mostly consistent with the last batch of research conducted by Kantar Media two years ago – only TV programming has shown change, rising by one percentage point. It shows that 10 million UK internet users have accessed films online.

Interestingly, the respondents said that they would be happy to stop accessing pirated content if there were cheaper legal services available (25%) and if all of the content they wanted was available legally (21%).

In the film category, ten million UK internet users were found to have accessed movies online.

YouTube, Amazon and Spotify are the top platforms used to download and stream music, and 54% of all music streams and downloads came from YouTube. (That equates to roughly 7.8 million Brits pirating at least one item over a three-month period.) Nine percent of internet users aged 12 and above admitted to downloading or streaming music illegally at least once between March and May 2015.

“By building a clear picture of online streaming and downloading trends we can work with industry and worldwide partners to tackle the problems of internet piracy and increase public awareness of the ways people can download and stream legally”.