Study shows over 36,000 Irish adults downloading illegally

As many as 1 in 5 adults in Ireland downloaded TV shows or or movies illegally over the last year, according to new research.

The study, conducted by Ignite Research on behalf of communications group Core Media, shows that 36,806 Irish adults illegally download such content every day.

Younger adults are most likely to download content with 1 in 3 adults aged between 15 and 24 having done so in the last 12 months. Approximately 1 in 4 adults aged between 25 to 34 admit to doing the same, as do 1 in 20 of those aged 55 years or more.

The analysis shows that legal download services like Netflix seem to be having a marginal impact on consumer's behaviour with 31 per cent of survey respondents saying they are now downloading more material legally than 12 months ago.

In a minority of cases, some respondents reported increasing the amount of content they downloaded from both legal and illegal sources.

As many as 59 per cent of adults interviewed said their downloading behaviour had not changed in the past year , while 12 per cent reported downloading more content illegally than previously.

"In the past, many people saw illegal downloading as being all about music. However, with increasing broadband penetration and more importantly, increasing speed of broadband we are seeing a large increase in the number of people illegally downloading broadcast content," said Conor Hughes, director of Ignite Research.

“Forty per cent of our “illegal downloaders” are using torrent sites and other peer to peer networks to obtain television programmes. The two key reasons for this are still the fact that it is free and the easy availability of such content,” he added.

According to the study, searches for homegrown programmes such as Love/Hate are consistently lower than for international shows such as Game of Thrones.

Approximately 42 per cent of those surveyed said they download content illegally because they either can’t get the content legally elsewhere or want to see it before their friends do.

Ignite surveyed 1,000 adults for the research, which was carried out in November and December.