A London-based firm called the Global Web Index conducted research that suggested that streaming might be the answer to online piracy.
According to the study, almost two-thirds of Internet users stream video clips online, while 31 percent watch full-length movies and TV shows. In the United Kingdom, 27 percent have downloaded free movies or TV shows to their computers.
More important, the study found that people who download content illegally don't do it because they want it for free. Instead, they simply want it as soon as possible, and with the advent of simple streaming websites like YouTube and Hulu, fewer and fewer people have been turning to file-sharing.
Two companies, Lightspeed Research and Trendstream, collaborated on the study.
“Thanks to the rise of online services such as Spotify, Hulu, iPlayer and of course YouTube, the environment has been created where you can stream almost all the content you would ever want," Trendstream Managing Director Tom Smith said. "If everything I want is available on demand, the concept of ownership is diminished. I no longer need to have it on my hard drive. I just play what I want when I want. This is not only a threat to traditional packaged sales of music, TV and film, it will also kill off piracy. Why pirate when you can stream?”
The Global Web Index interviewed 16,000 web users in 16 countries, including the United States, the U.K. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, Canada, Russia, Mexico, Brazil and India, among others.
The study comes in the wake of other similar studies that came to similar conclusions. In July, a company called Leading Question looked into the online habits of teenage music fans.
Researchers found that more and more teens were turning to streaming services like YouTube to listen to music instead of file-sharing programs. Less than a third of teens are illegally sharing and downloading music.
In all, between December 2007 and June 2009, the percentage of teens that illegally downloaded music dropped from 42 percent to 26 percent.
New York-based Venture capitalist Fred Wilson pointed out that streaming media doesn't eliminate the core problem of piracy because many streaming solutions are still free.
"I am not a fan of file-based media business models," he said. "They lead to piracy and they put transactional friction into a system that doesn't require it. Streaming is much better. Unfortunately, we don't have a good mobile broadband system to make streaming possible everywhere. And until that happens, we will have files and we will have piracy."
