59% of Asian Consumers Admit to Piracy. The 23% Subscription Hike Probably Isn't Helping.

Here’s an update on a story I’ve been following closely, mostly because I pay for too many streaming subscriptions to talk about it in polite company.

A new survey reports that 59% of Asian consumers admitted to digital piracy — that is, obtaining copyrighted films, shows, and other media through unauthorized channels — in 2024, up from 52% the year before ^[1][2]. The year-over-year jump of seven percentage points is, by industry standards, a public relations problem. By the standards of, say, a fast-growing regional streaming service, it is also a target market. Somewhere, a strategy team is putting this in a slide deck. Congratulations to them.

The rise tracks with subscription costs climbing 23% between 2023 and 2024 ^[3], with prices increasing further still in 2025 ^[4]. To be fair to the streamers, the math here is their math: when the cost of going legal goes up by a quarter, the cost of going pirate, by definition, stays the same. That is to say, free. Of course, the streamers have other math. Their math says: raise prices by 23%, then complain that customers are not converting. Their math says: launch an ad tier that is also not cheap, then complain that customers are not converting. Their math says: bundle, unbundle, rebundle, then complain that customers are not converting. The math, in fairness, is internally consistent. The math just doesn’t add up to a number the customer wants to sign on the dotted line for.

The other half of the equation is fragmentation. Content is now spread across a bunch of different streaming platforms ^[5], which is the industry’s way of saying: we have collectively decided that you should pay each of us individually, on a recurring basis, in perpetuity. Want to watch one sports league? Subscription. Want the prestige drama everyone is talking about? Subscription. Want the animated show your nephew won’t shut up about? Subscription, and that one now includes ads. The total monthly bill for a household that wants to watch, in any given month, the things people are talking about at work, has crossed into the territory where it competes with the electricity bill. I did mathematics. The mathematics did not comfort me.

Consumers, the survey found, are not happy about the rising costs ^[6], and they say they are feeling fatigued by how many parts of their lives are now subscription-based ^[7]. The word the survey used was “fatigued.” That is the polite form. The cost of a mid-tier streaming subscription has, in the past couple of years, become a small recurring moral decision: do I watch this show on the platform I have, or do I watch it on the platform my friend has, on their account, on their couch, with the implicit understanding that we will not discuss this in the group chat? Apparently, the second option is winning.

I am not, of course, telling anyone to visit any piracy site in particular. Definitely not. I am reading the news, which is what I do. The news, in this case, is that the same survey pointed to subscription fatigue as one of the drivers of the piracy uptick. The news is also that streaming services have responded to this in the way any reasonable business responds to a problem: they have built entire teams whose only job is to send legal letters to piracy sites, which promptly reappear under a slightly different domain name within a week ^[8]. It is, by all accounts, the most expensive game of whack-a-mole ever devised, and the mallet is also subscription-based.

In fairness to the industry, taking down piracy sites is the legally correct thing to do. In fairness to the consumer, the industry’s response to “we can’t afford all of you” has been to charge them more. In fairness to the people running the piracy sites, they have, by all evidence, a better uptime than the platform I am currently paying for, which crashed twice during a football match last weekend. I will not name the platform, because I am a professional. I will say only that its logo is, in this household, currently the subject of a small shrine dedicated to its demise, and that the shrine is non-refundable.

The car line, by the way, still works. You’d think it wouldn’t — “you wouldn’t download a car” has aged, charitably, into a punchline. And yet, when the choice is between a car payment and a streaming subscription, a meaningful number of people are choosing the metaphorical car. The 59% is, in this sense, the receipt. The 23% is the headline. The fragmentation is the fine print. The whack-a-mole is the industry’s way of pretending the headline, the receipt, and the fine print do not all point in the same direction.

Make of that what you will. I have made my peace. My subscriptions are paid. My platforms crash predictably. My friend has a couch. I will see you next week, and I will not be telling you to do anything.