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From BitTorrent users spending big to Walmart customers not paying enough, read this and other news stories from the week ending 23 November 2014.

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Netflix's share of peak download bandwidth has grown in the second half of 2014, but only slightly, according to a report by network management firm Sandvine.

Sandvine's bi-annual Global Internet Phenomena Report shows that Netflix's share of peak download traffic in North America has grown from 34% in the first half to nearly 35% (34.98%) in the second half.

Showing Netflix's dominance in the region, Amazon Instant Video, the second largest subscription video-on-demand service, only accounted for 2.6% of peak download traffic. This was still more than double what the service consumed 18 months ago.

Netflix's global dominance may also grow thanks to the its official introduction into more regions next year, including into the Australasian region. But despite Netflix's lack of an official presence in that region, 2.5% of users, on an unnamed fixed network in the region, are already accessing the service via geo-unblockers, accounting for as much as 4% of peak downstream traffic.

The figures also show HBO's introduction of a standalone streaming product in 2015 can't any come sooner, with its current cable-tied HBO Go product only accounting for 1% of download traffic.

"With both Netflix and Amazon Instant Video gaining bandwidth share in North America during 2014, it will be fascinating to see how a standalone HBOGO streaming option will impact networks when it launches in 2015," said Dave Caputo, President and CEO, Sandvine.

The increasing popularity of legal streaming options may also be having an effect on illegal download traffic, with filesharing traffic continuing to shrink in all regions, except in Asia-Pacific countries.

A survey conducted by BitTorrent Inc has found that BitTorrent users are much more likely to pay for music and movies than the average Internet user.

The survey, which took place in September and involved 2,500 respondents, looked at the movie and music purchasing habits of BitTorrent users and found some surprising results.

An amazing 50% of those that responded say they buy music each and every month, making BitTorrent users, or at least those surveyed, 170% more likely to pay for music than compared to an average Internet user.

For paid streaming services like Spotify Premium, those surveyed are 8 times more likely to pay for such a service than average users. This is based on stats released by the music industry's own copyright lobby, which found that only 2% of Internet users have signed up for a premium account (compared to 16% of those surveyed).

On average, BitTorrent users spend on average $48 on music per year. Money that BitTorrent Inc hope that users will start spending on their own paywall music platform, BitTorrent Bundle. BitTorrent Bundle allows artists to distribute music directly via the BitTorrent platform using the company's own paygate system, allowing artists to received up to 90% of all revenue from music sales on the platform.

"BitTorrent Bundle was started based on this premise and we have more than 10,000 artists now signed up, with more to come. With 90% of purchase going to the content creators, BitTorrent Bundle is the most artist friendly, direct-to-fan distribution platform on the market," BitTorrent Inc.'s Director of Communications Christian Averill told BitTorrent news website TorrentFreak.

For movies, the results are just as encouraging. 52% of respondents say they buy movies on a monthly basis, with over a third of users spending more than $100 annually. 47% also paid to watch a movie at the cinemas in the preceding 12 month.

The enthusiasm of users when it comes to spending money, the same users often accused of being nothing but hardcore pirates, comes as no surprise to BitTorrent Inc's Christian Averill. And even those on the pro-copyright side have come to admit that pirates are also customers, sometimes the best customers when it comes to both music and movies.

"The results confirm what we knew already, that our users are super fans. They are consumers of content and are eager to reward artists for their work," says Averill.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 8th November 2014 is in. A magnificent week led by box office hit Maleficent helped Blu-ray weekly market share and revenue rise to nearly a six month high.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

Spotify has defended its business model following the decision by Taylor Swift's label Big Machine to pull all of the singer's work from the streaming platform.

Swift, whose newest album "1989" is currently topping the charts, withdrew all of her previous work from Spotify last week. No official reason has yet been given for the removal, but Swift herself spoke out against "free music" in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal back in July.

Spotify however has responded by outlining the contributions it has made to the music industry on a blog post by CEO Daniel Ek.

Ek starts by agreeing with Swift's assertions that music shouldn't be free by saying that "artists deserve to be paid for it". Ek backs up his support by highlighting the fact that Spotify has already paid $2 billion to music labels, with half of that coming in the last year alone.

Ek says that Spotify is competing and winning against piracy, and while labels and some artists may complain about the size of their royalty payments, Ek says this is money that they probably wouldn't have made. 

"... that’s two billion dollars’ worth of listening that would have happened with zero or little compensation to artists and songwriters through piracy or practically equivalent services if there was no Spotify," writes Ek.

Ek also highlights the increasing number of paid subscribers that Spotify now has, 12.5 million users who have chosen to pay, to counter claims that the free ad-supported plan does not lead to revenue for artists.

In fact, top artists like Taylor Swift receive on average $6 million per year from Spotify, Ek reveals.

Ek says that instead of comparing Spotify to other digital platforms, and accusing the service of cannibalising other legal options, Spotify should be compared to radio and other promotional platforms. Ek says that a top song on Spotify may get 500,000 ad-based listens, which may not pay out as much as 500,000 iTunes purchases, but it is equivalent to the number of listens that occur for the song on a popular radio station, listens which do not generate any revenue for the artist. The promotional effects of Spotify, says Ek, is also helping artists like Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande to generate record sales.

Ek concludes by saying that Spotify is good for everyone involved. "We're not just streaming, we’re mainstreaming now, and that's good for music makers and music lovers around the world," says Ek.

The MPAA's WhereToWatch.com website has been relaunched in a new beta form that makes it easier for users to find legal ways to watch their favourite movies and TV shows. 

First launched in 2013, the version of the site available then was a simple one page affair that listed the commons ways users can download or stream content online. 

The new version launched this week now includes a sleek interface and a fully searchable database, which then shows the various ways users can buy or subscribe to the said content online, from Netflix to Vudu, from Hulu to Xbox Video.

For the titles that aren't yet available to watch legally online, users can set an email alert to be notified whenever new watching options become available, such as when Netflix adds the season or the movie to their library.

The MPAA has been keen recently to highlight the legal digital options available to users, after being criticized for not providing enough options to those willing to pay. The MPAA may also be responding to criticism it itself received from Google, for not having enough listable legal content and pages to put into Google's index, ahead of piracy related results. With this latest update of the WhereToWatch website, with its enhanced search functionalities and a database of titles each with their own page, it should allows Google to be able to more easily crawl for legal results, and display these results to users.

Figures released by DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group shows a continued decline in disc sales, but partially offset by growing digital revenue.

Blu-ray disc and DVD sales fell 8% in the third quarter of 2014 compared to the same quarter a year ago, with revenue dropping by $0.4 billion for the year through Sept. 30. 

But total revenue for all media for the quarter was only down 1.2%, or $0.5 billion, thanks largely to growing digital sales.

Electronic sellthrough (EST) rose 26.7% for the quarter, while still remaining only a small part of sellthrough revenue (18%, compared to 82% for discs). Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) revenue, which includes revenue from powerhouse Netflix, also rose by more than 26% in the first 9 month of 2014. Only Transaction video-on-demand (VOD) revenue fell, down 7%.

The disc rentals business continues to falter, with a 32% decline in sales for physical video stores and a 11.5% fall for kiosk based rentals, such as at Redbox machines.

Combined revenue for the quarter was at $3.92 billion (down from $3.97 billion, -1.2%), and at $12.5 billion for the first nine month of 2014 (down from $12.62 billion, -1%).

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 1st November 2014 is in. The best of a rather poor week was Deliver Us From Evil. There's been too many of these poor weeks recently, don't you think? Awaiting better releases to Deliver Us From the Doldrums ...

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here