A research report published by anti-piracy firm Irdeto counters the notion that P2P piracy is becoming less relevant. The company shows that P2P sites, mostly BitTorrent-related, remain more popular than streaming in several countries. P2P traffic is growing in several regions and these sites remain an important content source for illicit streaming portals.

The report from anti-piracy outfit Irdeto shows that P2P remains very relevant. In fact, it’s still the dominant piracy tool in many countries.

Irdeto researched site traffic data provided by an unnamed web analytics partner. The sample covers web traffic to 962 piracy sites in 19 countries where P2P was most used. This makes it possible to see how P2P site visits compare to those of pirate streaming sites.

The data reveal that there are massive differences in the relative use of P2P versus streaming sites between countries.

In Russia, for example, only two percent of the visits go to streaming sites, while the rest of the traffic goes to P2P portals. P2P also outperforms streaming in other countries such as Australia, the Netherlands, and India.

However, in Germany 88 percent of all visits go to pirate streaming sites. Similarly, streaming is also the dominant web piracy tool in the United States, France, Spain and other countries.

Additional research in eight countries shows that piracy traffic has grown during 2017. This growth also applies to P2P sites, in all but one country, Germany.

Iredeto said that 70 percent of all pirate traffic goes to P2P sites, which appears to run counter to the popular narrative that streaming is more dominant today.