The biggest piracy sites in the world aren’t what you think

For many years, torrent sites were the go-to destination for most movie and TV-show pirates. However, new data shows that this is no longer the case, reports TorrentFreak.

Pirates much prefer to stream their video content than torrent it.

This news is courtesy of a report published by MUSO, which found that streaming sites have taken over as the prime source of video piracy.

The data from MUSO covers visits to 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites from 226 countries. In total, the company recorded 141 billion visits to pirate sites last year.

More than half of these visits relate to video piracy, which includes movies and TV-shows. The vast majority of these, 57.84 billion (74%), are visits to pirate streaming sites.

So what’s caused the shift?

“Piracy audiences are becoming better connected, more tech savvy, and know what they want, which is why so many of them have chosen to stream infringing content, rather than download it illegally,” MUSO’s CCO Christopher Elkins says.