Malaysia’s video piracy ranking falls but women are leading consumers lured by Korean dramas

The trend was discovered by the Asia Video Industry Association (Avia) in its 2024 survey which revealed that Malaysian women constitute 64 per cent of pirated content consumers, compared to 55 per cent among men.

While the survey did not specify the genre of the illicit video content consumed by women, Avia’s general manager of the Coalition Against Piracy (CAP), Matthew Cheetham, believed that Korean TV dramas were “highly probable.”

“Having worked on this for a very long time, I know how popular Korean TV dramas are when it comes to being pirated, but to be fair, this is my assumption because the question did not ask, ‘do you watch Korean TV drama?’,” said Cheetham.

The findings of Avia’s report were disclosed by Cheetham during a workshop with Malaysian regulators and enforcement hosted by Astro at the All Asia Broadcast Centre in Bukit Jalil, here, on Tuesday.

Vietnam emerged as the top country for video piracy among the eight Asian nations surveyed by Avia in 2024, with a staggering 71 per cent incidence rate, closely followed by the Philippines at 70 per cent.

Indonesia came in third (62 per cent), tailed by Thailand (61 per cent), Malaysia (59 per cent), Hong Kong (57 per cent), Taiwan (50 per cent) and Singapore (40 per cent).

According to Cheetham Malaysia’s fall to fifth place in this year’s survey was largely due to a surge of piracy incidence in the preceding top four countries.

Interestingly, Avia’s findings also illustrated a downward trend of video piracy incidence in Malaysia from 2022, 2023 and 2024; at 61 per cent, 60 per cent and 59 per cent, respectively.

“It was due to the process at play and Malaysia did well.

“The blocking regime was pretty good, although it seems to slow down a little bit towards the end of 2022 but last year it started to get a little better.

“There were also criminal actions that were undertaken last year, I think that would have impacted it but, in other countries, you saw a surge, particularly in Vietnam and the Philippines,” said Cheetham.

Similar to the rest of the surveyed countries, social media and messaging platforms were the most popular means used by Malaysians to access pirated content, with Facebook and Telegram sharing the top spot at 44 per cent.

TikTok came in second place at 36 per cent, followed by WhatsApp (33 per cent), Instagram (28 per cent) and WeChat (18 per cent).