That Cinema: Russians are reorienting from pirate to legal video services
Russians have begun to reorient themselves from pirate to legal video services. Experts call this trend an upward trend. Online cinemas confirm the trend - the country is actively increasing the production of domestic content, while pirated content is actively blocked. Roskomnadzor informed Izvestia about the removal of 908 thousand pages of such content in 2024. Experts believe that the improvement of monitoring and blocking processes and the attractiveness of legal services for viewers make pirates lose income and their resources.
What Russians watch
In Russia, users of online movie theaters have begun to choose legal resources over pirated content more often. This trend is confirmed by the growth of online movie theater users. People keep subscriptions to official services, which means they like the range and functionality, said Alexey Byrdin, general director of the Internet Video Association. He called this trend an upward trend.
According to the expert, today the issue of finding pirated content and viewing it by a user on the Web is much more important from the point of view of media consumption than its presence on the Internet in general.
Denis Kuskov, CEO of TelecomDaily, noted that thereis no big growth of piracy on the Web this year. Its peak came in 2022, after foreign majors left, he added.
Thus, Roskomnadzor for the first 10 months of 2024 removed or blocked more than 908 thousand Internet pages, which disseminated information with infringement of copyright or related rights. This is 2.6% more than a year earlier, the service told Izvestia.
According to Ksenia Boletskaya, director of industry relations at Yandex, the growth of annual subscriptions can be interpreted as confirmation of the trend toward legal content and interest in Russian projects - in 2024, a record number of Kinopoisk users bought a subscription for a year at a time. From January to November inclusive, this figure increased 3.5 times compared to the same period in 2023.
- Now 13 million subscribers watch movies and TV series, and more than 80% of them choose Russian content. The trend of watching domestic product has not become weaker this year. In the fall season in the top 20 most popular series, according to the "Kinopoisk Pro Index", included 10 Russian projects. And we see that the mass audience regularly pays for online access to domestic movies and TV series, they become hits and are actively discussed in social networks," she said.
The online movie theater Wink also confirmed this trend to Izvestia, but did not disclose figures on the growth of subscribers.
According to the Movix video service, which conducted a study of viewer preferences in major Russian cities from January to November 2024, in Moscow the leader in terms of total viewing time was the Turkish romantic series "Knock on My Door". In second place is a sharp detective "Novichok" about the everyday life of a novice policeman. Closes the top three domestic series "Method" - a psychological thriller about an unusual investigator and his trainee.
How much pirated content has been blocked in Russia
Thevolume of the online piracy market for the first half of 2024 decreased by 9.5% compared to the same period last year, and by the end of 2023 it decreased by 16%, said the head of the Department of Digital Risk Protection (Digital Risk Protection) company F.A.C.C.T.. Stanislav Goncharov. In 2023, a third of search traffic to pirate portals decreased by about 10%, while legal streaming video services, on the contrary, increased by the same 10%.
- One of the factors that makes life more difficult for pirates is the emergence of a mechanism for quickly removing links in the search engine. 30 minutes is the average time of detection of the first pirated copy on the Web, about 80% of links to illegal resources can be cleaned up in the first seven days, and 87% of pirated links are removed in pretrial proceedings," he said.
According to his data, in the first half of 2024, 96.5% of pirated content was placed on websites, about 2% - in social networks, 1.5% - in messengers and very little - on video hosting.
Improved monitoring and blocking processes, the departure of some "gray" advertisers, and the attractiveness of legal services to viewers - these factors are forcing pirates to lose income and their resources. But still illegal services can take away about a third of the traffic of unprotected films from official cinemas, the expert summarized.
From the point of view of controlling bodies, which should block pirated content on the Web, the process is quite well worked out, said Duma deputy Anton Nemkin. Among other things, there are automatic tools to find resources with pirated content, and there is a well-tested process of interaction with Roskomnadzor, he added.
- But there is one problem - about 98% of sites are successfully blocked, while the main demand is usually taken by the remaining 2%, which cannot be blocked because they are not in our domain zone, not in the Russian jurisdiction. Therefore, globally it turns out that 2% prevent white services from receiving all the traffic, - said Anton Nemkin.
He reminded that Russia has a "Memorandum of Cooperation in the field of exclusive rights protection in the digital era", the so-called mechanism of industry self-regulation. Its essence is that the right holders, who signed the document, can remove links to pages with illegal copies of works from the search engine out of court, sending data to the Register of pirated copies of content of domestic right holders, said the deputy.
According to his data, for all the time of the memorandum, since 2018, more than 301 million links to pirated content have been removed from the search results.
