Vietnam has 3rd highest number of online video piracy consumers in Southeast Asia

People shop at a CD/DVD fair in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo by VnExpress/Thanh Thanh

Online video piracy is worsening in Vietnam with the number of users watching or listening to pirated stuff estimated at 15.5 million, the third highest in the Southeast Asia reports VN Express.

This was disclosed in a report by Media Partners Asia at a seminar on online piracy in Vietnam and its prevention held earlier this week in Hanoi.

Neil Gane, consultant at the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the largest content coalition in the world representing over 30 major global entertainment companies and film studios, said Vietnam ranks only behind Indonesia and the Philippines in Southeast Asia in terms of users of pirated contents.

But on a per capita basis, Vietnam ranks first in accessing and sharing them, he said.

This causes the digital content industry losses of US$348 million, or 18 percent of its revenues.

"In Vietnam, only about 4 percent of users subscribe to legal content."

If it is not addressed, the number of users could reach 19.5 million by 2027, resulting in losses of $456 million, he claimed.

On the other hand, if piracy is controlled, it would create 4,870 new jobs, he claimed further.

Le Quang Tu Do, deputy director of the Department of Radio, Television, and Electronic Information, said a large number of complaints have been received recently against piracy of copyrighted content, primarily football, movies, game shows, and music.

The piracy is highly sophisticated and constantly changing, always concealing information, and offering content from overseas, he said.

Pham Hoang Hai, director of the department’s Vietnam Digital Content Copyright Center, said the most common acts of piracy are live streaming, reposting broadcasted content on different social networks or websites and cropping, editing, and illegally reposting them online.

Pirated content is illegally used on a variety of platforms, including licensed OTT websites and applications, websites that register domain names and set up servers in other countries, pirated OTT apps shared on the Internet or installed via Android TV box devices, popular social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch, he said.

Do said it takes a lot of effort and time to manage this because pirated content has many ways to circumvent legal provisions, even bypassing AI, making it difficult to detect.

The center has coordinated with various authorities to prevent users from accessing over 500 pirated websites, he said.

According to German market and consumer data company Statista, the number of mobile Internet users in Vietnam last year was an estimated 71.5 million and the number is expected to rise to 82.2 million by 2025.

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