Piracy in Context: A Regional Focus on Spain and Portugal

Across Europe, piracy data increasingly points to the importance of understanding regional market dynamics rather than relying on uniform assumptions. In markets where content production, audience behaviour, and access habits are closely intertwined, piracy emerges as one of several structural factors shaping the audiovisual ecosystem. Within the European audiovisual ecosystem, certain regions stand out not simply because of output volume, but because of how locally rooted storytelling aligns with audience behaviour and cross-border circulation. Taking these dynamics into account, this paper adopts a regional focus and examines Iberia as a market where production structures, audience behaviour, and piracy intersect and must be assessed together.

Iberia: Production Strength and Structural Piracy Exposure

Centred on Spain and Portugal, Iberia has consolidated its position as a significant production region within Europe. Increased content output, deeper international collaboration, and sustained engagement from global streaming platforms have reinforced the region’s relevance.

At the same time, this production strength must be viewed alongside a structural market reality: piracy. In Iberia, piracy exposure is closely tied to established consumption habits and access behaviour, rather than to isolated titles or release strategies. Illegal access to film, television, and sports content persists as a recurring practice within the market, making piracy an integral part of the region’s content consumption landscape. Understanding this dynamic is essential to assessing risk, distribution, and sustainability in the Iberian audiovisual ecosystem.

In Spain, piracy penetration is closely linked to viewing behaviour. Audience-focused analyses show that pirated content holds a significant position within the OTT ecosystem.

According to data from Grupo de Estudios de Comunicación Audiovisual (GECA), 47.4% of OTT users in Spain report consuming pirated television content. Piracy consumption spans multiple content categories, with films (32.8%), television series (30.6%), and live sports (18.4%) among the most frequently accessed formats. This distribution indicates that piracy is not limited to a single genre but affects premium audiovisual content across the market.

Age-based analysis highlights the concentration of piracy consumption among younger users. Among those aged 18 to 24, 73.2% report accessing unauthorised copies of content originally distributed through paid streaming platforms. Piracy consumption, however, is not confined to younger audiences. Across the wider population, an estimated 45% of users report some level of illegal audiovisual content consumption, pointing to a broad and established pattern of use.

Live sports broadcasting is one of the most exposed segments of piracy in Spain, with illegal streaming of sporting events widely observed. In football, LaLiga estimates that piracy-related losses linked to unauthorised football broadcasts amount to approximately €600 to €700 million per year, reflecting revenue erosion experienced by LaLiga clubs from football media rights.

Beyond sports, piracy also generates substantial losses in film and television. According to data from the Observatorio de la Piratería y Hábitos de Consumo de Contenidos Digitales, piracy in the film and television sector resulted in approximately €721 million in lost revenues, contributing to a broader €3.03 billion economic impact attributed to digital piracy across Spain’s cultural industries.

In Spain, piracy emerges as both a behavioural phenomenon rooted in audience access and consumption habits and an economic issue with clearly measurable financial consequences.

A similarly high-intensity pattern is observed in Portugal, where piracy persistence is clearly reflected in user behaviour metrics. Data presented at the II Colloquium on Digital Piracy of Audiovisual Content (Lisbon), drawing on monitoring referenced by EUIPO, indicates that Portuguese internet users recorded an average of approximately 1,200 piracy-related website visits per user between 2017 and early 2025, significantly above the European average of around 900 visits per user over the same period. More recent monitoring confirms that this intensity has not diminished, with per-user piracy-related visits during 2024–2025 continuing to exceed EU benchmarks.

At the household level, national sector assessments, including figures cited by APRITEL, estimate that over 288,000 households in Portugal access illegal audiovisual services on a monthly basis, generating an annual economic impact of approximately €250 million across pay-TV, VOD, and the wider audiovisual ecosystem. Piracy consumption is disproportionately concentrated among younger audiences, with around 34% of users aged 15–24. Despite broadband penetration in Portugal remaining below the EU average, piracy levels continue to be high, indicating that illicit audiovisual consumption is driven primarily by entrenched user behaviour and access habits rather than infrastructure availability.

Implications for Rights Holders in Iberia

In Spain and Portugal, legal and technical measures addressing online piracy are actively in place. Domain-level interventions, access restrictions, and legal proceedings targeting illegal distribution activities indicate that piracy is treated as a recognized market issue at a regional level.

Within the Iberian market, piracy is closely linked to established consumption behaviours and evolves in parallel with legitimate content access. As a result, enforcement measures influence access dynamics, while piracy exposure remains a persistent factor within the market environment. From a regional perspective, piracy is not limited to specific moments or content categories but accompanies content availability across its lifecycle.

This context has clear implications for rights holders. In Iberia, piracy risk is not confined to large-scale releases or high-profile titles. Instead, each individual intellectual property (IP) carries a degree of exposure regardless of content type or distribution scale. Accordingly, piracy should be approached not as a temporary concern, but as a structural market consideration that requires planning and attention for every IP from the outset.