A new report released by Internet company Cisco Systems Inc on Thursday showed that online streaming of popular television series and movies have already overtaken file-sharing in terms of the number of users.
Despite strong showing of file-sharing websites in Sweden, Cisco, in a statement, said that online video streaming is actually much more popular to online users.
The company said that the case hurled against The Pirate Bay has played a huge role to the drop in the number of people using peer-to-peer file-sharing websites because of fears that they might also held liable to the “illegal” activities.
Earlier, a Swedish court has convicted the founders of the P2P file-sharing website.
Also, Cisco said that the broadband Internet connection is becoming faster and more reliable making users tune in more to live or recorded video streaming more often. The faster broadband speed also eliminates the need for users to download copyrighted materials such as movies and music and reduce the risk of them being prosecuted.
“Even though the actual number of people doing file-sharing activities continued to increase, we have calculated that it will become less important in the coming months,” Cisco Sweden technical manager Henrick Bergqvist said.
Sweden’s most popular file-sharing advocate, also the founders of The Pirate Bay, will be launching the new online streaming service called Video Bay in the coming months.
The people behind the said program said that they were inspired by the growing success of music streaming service Spotify and video streaming website Voddler.
Based on the Swedish Law, video and music streaming is not illegal but it is, however, unlawful to upload.
Meanwhile, Cisco expects file-sharing on the Internet to continue growing in the coming years as more countries are not yet that well-protected by the online laws. The firm also eyes an 80 percent yearly increase for the platform.
But Cisco insisted that online streaming will be more popular in the coming years with a predicted 130 percent yearly growth rate.