Cam Cullen of Sandvine has made a curious observation: “File sharing on the internet reverses a downward trend.”

He details on his blog:

“In 2011, file sharing was huge on fixed networks and tiny on mobile. In the Americas, for example, 52.01% of upstream traffic on fixed networks and 3.83% of all upstream mobile traffic was BitTorrent. In Europe, it was even more, with 59.68% of upstream on fixed and 17.03% on mobile. By 2015, those numbers had fallen significantly, with Americas being 26.83% on the upstream and Europe being 21.08% on just fixed networks. During the intervening year, traffic volume has grown drastically on the upstream, with more social sharing, video streaming, OTT messaging, and even gaming on it.”

And concludes: “That trend appears to be reversing, especially outside of the Americas.”

Karl Bode of Motherboard continues in an article focussing on piracy:

“After years of declines, BitTorrent usage and piracy is on the rise again. The culprit: an increase in exclusivity deals that force subscribers to hunt and peck among a myriad of streaming services to actually find the content they’re looking for.”

Case in point, Disney is about to pull its titles from Netflix and launch its own streaming service.

Karl argues:

“The problem: consumers only have so much disposable income, and the growing laundry-list of services users now need to subscribe to if they want to watch all of their favorite movies and shows can not only become confusing, but prohibitively expensive. That’s especially true overseas, where geographical viewing restrictions hamper access to popular U.S. content. As a result, these users are starting to drift back to piracy.”

My take: it’s paradoxical that, as they move away from expensive Cable TV bundles of standard and premium content to the internet and its cheaper streaming services, viewers now face the daunting and expensive task of recreating similar bundles online. Hence the lure of BitTorrent for some: they can get all of their favourites there. Recall this was the case before Apple launched iTunes and gave law-abiding citizens an easy, relatively cheap way to download their music. (In the meantime, music has moved to a subscription-based model.) Who will be the first to offer every TV show and movie in a subscription service? This would be the culmination of the evolution from Cable TV to Premium TV to VOD to Streaming.