Vievers Set Sail on The High Seas Again as Rising Subscription Costs Push Them Toward Piracy

As streaming prices rise and choices get more confusing, more people are turning to piracy to watch movies and TV shows. VPNs and illegal streaming sites are seeing a huge increase in users. Sweden, home of Spotify and The Pirate Bay, is leading the way.

According to London-based piracy monitoring company MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the main source of film and TV piracy. In 2023, it made up 96% of all pirated content. Piracy hit a low in 2020 with 130 billion website visits, but by 2024 it had jumped to 216 billion visits.

In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed admitted to pirating content in 2024. Most of them were young people between 15 and 24. Piracy is back, just under a different flag.

Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, the company behind Steam, said in 2011, “Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.” Today, that feels more true than ever. With shows and movies spread across multiple platforms, subscription prices rising, and slow streaming depending on your device or browser, it’s no wonder people are looking for easier, illegal ways to watch.

Studios have built walls around their content, forcing viewers to pay multiple fees just to watch what they want. This creates artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised easy access.

Whether people pirate out of frustration or rebellion doesn’t really matter. The fact is, they’re going to the high seas. As streaming services fracture into separate, walled-off territories, more viewers are choosing piracy.

If studios want to survive, they might need to focus on making content simple to access and easy to use. But with rising prices and increasingly complicated platforms, that doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.

The numbers tell the story clearly. Visits to pirated sites jumped from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion in 2024. And most of the pirated content, 96%, comes straight from streaming platforms. Even legal streaming alone isn’t enough to keep viewers away from piracy.

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