Online piracy still ruling
I have just concluded watching the latest third season of Game of Thrones, and in case you were marveling, I never watched it on HBO. This Is Africa (TIA) for crying out loud, so don’t expect any TV broadcasting network to have gotten the exclusive rights to air the series. I even incertitude if season two has been aired by any local broadcaster. (I stand to be corrected). With the advent of high-speed download internet, and thanks to the combination of online media piracy and torrents the biggest population this side of the Sahara is able to watch the latest series the minute they are aired in the US, download the latest games, movies, music; the list is just endless. And due to the fact that people share all this information online, the best way to acquire it is through torrents downloads. I know it’s unfair to the content creators, but who can we blame? The up-loaders of this copyrighted content? For sure we cannot restrain ourselves from downloading the content because online piracy still rules and since torrents are going nowhere anytime soon, it has become an addiction we cannot fight. A welcome addiction if you ask me.
“FYI: A torrent is a computer file that contains metadata about files and folders to be distributed, and usually also a list of the network locations of trackers, which are computers that help participants in the system find each other and form efficient distribution groups called swarms.”
It’s free content online
The most bizarre thing is that most internet users I meet are always wary of their data bills, this is the same fella you will find downloading movies, music and streaming like crazy using their data bundles. And then you wonder why the hell the guy is quetching about his data bundle running out fast.
One thing is for sure, torrent sites come up among the top five sites that hog bandwidth, as we see in that classified bandwidth graph above that we managed to get our hands on from a local giant wireless carrier. With course torrents rank among the highly used with the likes of YouTube, Facebook and obviously porn sites (aka Flash Video from the graph). All the sites I just mentioned have one thing in common; they provide free content if you know how to navigate to the web extensively.
It’s basically free content online that will save you the hustle of buying poor quality dubbed DVDs off the streets or being ripped off by local software distributors, so whatever the data charges, we are willing to neglect it, because at the end of the day it’s not actually free. We have to part with some cash to give to these carriers. Mega-fans will always be happy to plunk down a large wad of cash on a nicely packaged data bundle especially for the “unlimited” bundles for the wireless carriers.
With most of the media being consumed online, especially considering the fact that most carriers are pushing for a triple play solution (voice, data & video/TV) over 3G and LTE networks, I anticipate a massive push to reduce internet prices per kilobite. And trust me once this is achieved, the effect on torrent downloads will just spike cause we all like online freebies.
