Author: Digital Digest | Latest News

The Pirate Bay has been down for more than a week, but according to anti-piracy Excipio, piracy rates have not been affected by much.

While piracy rates saw a dip immediately following the closure of the world's most popular piracy site, from 99.0 million IP addresses engaged in donwloading on December 9 to 95.0 million the next day, the piracy rate quickly recovered back to 100.2 million just three days later. The average for much of November and December has been 100 million per day.

The reason for the quick recovery may be due to the fact that The Pirate Bay, while clearly the biggest torrent site, wasn't the only one. Other sites like KickassTorrents and the itself shut-down but re-launched isoHunt have simply filled the void left by The Pirate Bay. And this does not include the numerous newly launched Pirate Bay mirror sites, including one launched by the operators of isoHunt.

And it's still unknown if The Pirate Bay will be making an official comeback, with the team behind the site still pondering their options following this major setback.

Is Blu-ray in trouble?

Our "State of Play" feature looks at Blu-ray sales results from the last year and beyond, and identifies the major release milestones (Frozen, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire), as well as looking at trends involving both Blu-ray market share and revenue. Click on the link below to read our analysis: 

Blu-ray: The State of Play - December 2014

The Xbox One has finally scored a much needed victory of arch rival, the Sony PlayStation 4 console, during the biggest sales period of the year.

The month of November includes the Black Friday sales event, traditionally a busy period for the gaming industry in the US, but also increasingly around the world. That the Xbox One managed to emerge as the most popular console during this crucial month would have been of utmost importance to Microsoft, considering the relatively poor year the Xbox brand has just endured.

While the Xbox One was also successful last November, both the Xbox One and Sony's PS4 had just been launched at that time, and the nascent sales figures could not predict the trend that was so clear for most of 2014: that the PS4 would dominate sales, in both hardware and software.

Microsoft's attempt at clawing back lost market share started with a re-jigging of the default Xbox One package. By removing the Kinect motion gaming devices and making it an optional accessory, Microsoft was able to drop the price of the cheapest Xbox One console by $100 (to match that of the PS4). The Redmond based firm further undercut Sony this holiday shopping period by offering special holiday deals that discounted the console by $50, and as much as $150 when taking into account bundled games. 

It seems Microsoft's new pricing strategy has worked, earning the Xbox One it's first monthly sales win in 2014, in both the US and the UK markets.

Even more crucially, November represents a big month for game releases, with a new game being released in the popular 'Call of Duty' franchise. The Xbox One also scored a win here, with the Xbox 360 and Xbox One versions of 'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare' outselling all other platforms.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 6th December 2014 is in. A week that's not about quantity, but quality, with the A-list release of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes keeping Blu-ray revenue above $60 million for another week.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

From the disappearing Pirate Bay ship to the disappearing good will between Google and Hollywood, read these and other news stories from the week ending 14 December 2014.

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The Sony Pictures hacking incident leaked more than just the latest unreleased movies, but also revealed Hollywood's strategy to combat piracy.

Leaked emails sent to top studio executives, and obtained by TorrentFreak. detail Hollywood's wide ranging plan for dealing with the piracy problem in the next few years, their priorities for each identified source of piracy, and their strategy on how to reduce or eliminate the problem.

For the immediate future at least, Hollywood has identified cyberlocker and video streaming sites as the top priority, with piracy related apps also being targeted. A mixture of public advocacy, litigation (in the UK, Canada and Germany), and by targeting support services for these sites, including payment processors and advertising firms. Site blocking, domain seizures and expanding the copyright alert system, currently in operation in the US, to other markets including the UK, are some of the other strategies Hollywood will deploy to deal with these types of sites.

Interestingly, there is also mention of the development of "Site Scoring Services", which will give a site a "trustworthy" ranking, a blacklisting system that will allow advertisers, payment processors, domain name registrars and other support services to identify and ban suspected piracy sites.

BitTorrent falls into the middle priority category, with hints that popular hosting provider Cloudflare may become a target for litigation in an attempt to take down BitTorrent related piracy sites. Google and other search engines will be targeted, including supporting third-party lawsuits against these search engines in an effort to heap more pressure.

Among the low priority targets linking sites, unlicensed satellite/cable broadcasts and network DVR/Internet Retransmission services.

A Swedish police raid of a nuclear bunker style data center located in Nacka has taken down The Pirate Bay, and several other torrent related sites as collateral damage.

At the time of publishing, The Pirate Bay remains down in one of the longest downtimes the site has experienced. Other sites related to The Pirate Bay, including Suprbay and Pastebay, are also down, as are unrelated sites including EZTV, Zoink and Torrage.

And despite media reports suggesting that The Pirate Bay has moved to a Costa Rica based domain name (which is merely a proxy site that has been operating for months prior to this raid), no official word yet on when The Pirate Bay will be making a comeback.

Other sites, which used servers also hosted at the same Nacka facility, have started to come back online, including TV show torrent site EZTV.

According to information obtained by torrent news site TorrentFreak, while the Pirate Bay has mostly moved to a cloud and virtual based infrastructure, which is supposed to be immune to these kinds of take-downs, the raid may have taken down the load balancing server located at the Nacka facility, the last remaining physical "bottleneck" for The Pirate Bay.

What this also means is that the actual websites and servers that contain the Pirate Bay data is still online, somewhere, but users cannot connect to these servers because the load balancer, which switches between these servers to spread out usage, is down. In all likelihood, police will not have gotten access to user data or the site's files, and once the load balancer is replaced, the site will be back to normal operations fairly quickly.

But for now, the world's largest piracy site remains down. Down, but not out. Not yet.

Australian consumer group CHOICE has delivered the results of a study that finds Aussie pirates are much less the "freeloaders" that the movie industry often makes them out to be.

Instead of being people who never want to pay for anything, self confessed pirates in Australia are actually more likely than the average user to go to the movies, buy content from iTunes and have a streaming account.

The survey found that 1 in 3 Australians admitted to downloading pirated content, with almost 1 in 4 saying they do it on a monthly basis.

When it came to buying digital content, pirates were much more likely to pay for content via iTunes. Those that don't pirate were much less likely to pay for content as well. Only 12% of those that don't pirate paid for content on iTunes, compared to 16% for the general population, and a much higher 29% for self-confessed pirates.

The same results repeated itself when it comes to paying for a movie ticket, with 56% of "regular" pirates (those that pirate monthly) going to the movies at least once every month, compared to only 36% of the general population.

Pirates were also more likely to have and use streaming services, such as Australia's Quickflix.

As for why people pirate, CHOICE's study clearly demonstrated that pricing was the biggest issue, with 50% of pirates saying this was the main reason for their downloading habits. 41% also claimed that the lack of timely availability of certain content was the main driving force behind their decision to pirate.

CHOICE's Director of Campaigns and Communications Matt Levey says that content owners have to consider these issues when deciding how to punish pirates, and that it simply isn't a case of good non-pirating people versus those who "steal" content.

"A substantial proportion of people are pirating because of the high cost of content in Australia, and the time differences between releases here and overseas," says Levey.

"Some people have suggested we're a nation of pirates, but CHOICE has found we're a nation of couch potatoes who seek out content, online and off. This data shows that most Australians who pirate are even more willing to spend money on content than those who don't pirate," Mr Levey explained.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 29th November 2014 is in. This week includes the infamous Black Friday sales, so this will most likely represent the yearly high in terms of revenue. As usual, new releases are rare during a week which is more about discounting older titles, but The Expendables 3 was the best selling new release (and the only one) in the top 20.

Compared to BF 2013 though, things aren't looking too good for discs. Both Blu-ray and DVD revenue were down, with total revenue down 11.5%. DVD's decline was predicted, but Blu-ray's fall was a bit more surprising.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

From the hacking of Sony to the hacking of Denuvo, read these and other news stories from the week ending 7 December 2014.

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