A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer’s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that’s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the “enshittification” of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.
According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.
That’s because a lot of people in this community are techies, most people don’t have the skills to setup a seed box so it’s much easier to just go to a streaming site in their phone browser
that would legitimately blow my mind because every single streaming site I’ve ever found was significantly more difficult to find in the first place than downloading a torrent program and ultimately transient because they’re a single point of failure that will get taken down.
No, really. That’s what most people do.
You know how most people would think you are a hacker if you started running commands in terminal/CLI? Same thing with torrenting. Torrenting is this scary program that hackers use to put malware on your computer.
My wife was raised by an IT guy and uses firefox for everything, and she is also scared by torrenting. She’s more educated on it, sure, but she’s still scared of it because she thinks the FBI will arrest her for downloading pirated software. She’s much more comfortable going to one of those sketchy streaming sites behind the protection of a good adblocker.
I’d add to that that even less know how to securely set up a (remotely accessible) seedbox resistant to getting hacked