January 2015 4 World (MPAA), the number of legitimate U.S. streaming outlets has doubled to 100 since 2009, and Americans legally watched 5.7 billion movies and 56 billion TV shows in 2013, for an estimated $30 billion in expenditures. VideoAge calculated that if the MPAA’s educational and prosecutorial campaign “Operation In Our Site” could cut just 10 percent of online piracy in the U.S. for a year, annual streaming revenues would increase by 4.4 percent to $31.4 billion across the board. But according to Tru Optik, the popularity of piracy has nothing to do with cost, but with access, since more content is available illegally than legally. Indeed, content companies like Netflix and HBO reportedly use piracy to gauge consumer interest. U.S. Studios’ T&E Could Be $1 Billion In a survey of the top 100 corporate travel and related expense (T&E) expenditures around the world, four entertainment groups made the 2014 Business Travel News list. With an annual expenditure of $149.5 million for companywide air volume, Disney took the number 30 spot. In comparison, IBM ranked number one with $590 million. Disney’s total T&E amounted to $227.9 million. Comcast’s total T&E wasn’t recorded, but the survey ranked the group at number 41 with a U.S.-booked air volume of $95 million. TimeWarner took the 43rd slot with $87 million U.S.-booked air volume, even though companywide air volume reached $122 million and the group’s company-wide T&E reached $280.5 million. Finally, 21st Century Fox was number 90 with $57.9 million in company-wide air volume and $69.1 million in U.S. T&E. Another survey, this time conductedbyForresterResearch, revealed that T&E is the most difficult of expense categories to control, according to 24 percent of finance executives surveyed. The fault is found to reside with the way T&E is recorded, making it difficult to identify “opportunities for negotiated discounts with vendors,” according to the survey. More than 2.1 billion movies and close to two billion television shows were downloaded peer-to-peer globally in the first quarter of 2014 alone, according to last year’s report from Tru Optik, a Stamford, CT-based media research firm (“Digital Media Unmonetized Report, First and Second Quarter 2014”). The global unmonetized demand is estimated at $2.5 billion for television and $10.13 billion for movies. Tru Optik also estimated that each month in the U.S. alone there are 400 million illegal downloads. At times, like in the case of the movieThe Expendables 3, movies are downloaded even before their theatrical release. A study by Columbia University found that 70 percent of young adults in the U.S. ages 18 to 29 had copied or downloaded music or videos for free. However, according to the Washington-based Motion Picture Association of America Less Content Legally Available Online Makes For More Illegally Screened Content
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