As Subscription Costs Rise, Viewers Are Turning to the High Seas Once Again as Piracy Is on the Rise

As subscription prices climb and streaming options become more complicated, more people are turning to piracy to watch films and TV shows. VPNs and illegal streaming sites are seeing a surge in use, with Sweden leading the way.

Sweden is famous for both Spotify and The Pirate Bay, and it seems its residents haven’t lost their taste for accessing content freely.

According to London-based piracy monitoring company MUSO, most film and TV piracy comes from unlicensed streaming. In 2023, streaming made up 96% of all pirated content. After hitting a low point in 2020 with 130 billion website visits, piracy has shot back up, reaching 216 billion visits in 2024.

In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed admitted to pirating content in 2024, mostly 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 statement feels even more true. With content spread across many platforms, subscription prices rising, and slow streaming depending on your device or browser, it’s no surprise people are turning to illegal options.

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

Whether viewers pirate out of frustration or rebellion doesn’t matter much, they’re still sailing the high seas. As the streaming world fragments into walled-off territories, more and more people are choosing piracy.

The lesson is simple: if studios want to survive, they might need to focus on making content easy to access and simple to use, but if this report is to be believed, that won’t happen any time soon due to widespread enshittification of pretty much any service currently in existence.

Piracy numbers tell the story clearly. Visits to pirated sites jumped from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion in 2024. Most of the pirated content, 96%, comes directly from streaming platforms, showing that even legal streaming isn’t enough to keep viewers away from illegal options.

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