Piracy in Telugu industry: 10 most pirated films of 2017

The battle against film piracy is one that is being fought by filmmakers across industries. Although ample measures are being taken by the Telugu film industry to tame piracy, millions of files are still being downloaded and shared online.

Not only has it affected the revenues of the industry but unethical film viewing has also increased which creates a huge problem for the filmmakers, making them unhappy.

A Germany based tech-firm called TECXIPIO has released data to The Hinduthat tabulates the 10 most pirated Telugu movies of 2017. The firm tracks peer to peer downloading and sharing of files. It has recorded the demand of Telugu movies to be around 16 million.

The TECXIPIO’s spokesperson revealed to The Hindu, “We developed algorithms to map torrent activity to content ID spaces. The ‘Mapped Series and Movies section refers to file sharing activity, and we were able to identify the file as a movie or series and match it to an ID in our database.”

The major regions observed by TECXIPIO of P2P sharing of Telugu movies are India, followed by US, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, UAE and other middle east countries. In India most demand comes from Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada and Mumbai, in the respective order.

“Earlier, one odd film would get accidentally leaked before release date. But these days, pre-release piracy leaks have become a recurring feature, which is very alarming for the industry,” said Rajkumar Akella, Chairman of the Anti Video Piracy Cell, Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce to the Quint.

Speaking to The Hindu, the producer of the film DJ fumed at the ‘injustice’ and said it was the producer who suffered the maximum from piracy of intellectual property. He went on to say that despite leveraging the best of technology in the fight against piracy, there was always someone who managed to outmanoeuvre all possible safeguards just to prove a point.

“We had a meeting with the Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao,” says producer Suresh Babu in an interview with Deccan Chronicle. “The group comprised members from the cyber crime unit, various ISPs and people representing the Telugu film industry. The dialogue focused on how troublesome piracy has really become. Every year, Rs 90,000 crore is lost by filmmaking units all over the country to piracy. For T’wood, it’s nearly Rs 350 crore.”

The 10 most pirated Telugu movies of 2017 are as follows :

Baahubali: The conclusion has the most downloads and shares – a tremendous 9.37 million, which doesn’t come as a surprise. These shares are huge compared to other movies keeping in mind that it released in several different languages. More than 60% of users who shared Baahubali 2 in India also shared Baahubali : the beginning.

Baahubali 2 was followed by DJ – Duvvada Jagannadhan with 1.7 million downloads which surfaced on the day of release itself. The third place is taken byArjun Reddy with 1.4 million peers followed by Fidaa with 1.15 million peers.

On the fifth number is the movie Khaidi No. 150 with nearly a million downloads. Sixth number is given to the movie Ninnu Kori with 899,978 downloads. Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru were the most active sharing places.

Seventh on the list is Nenu Local with 869,978 followed by Lie with 841,974 shares. Nene Raju Nene Mantri and Raja The Great have the ninth and tenth place with 831,974 and 774,121 shares respectively.

[“Source-thenewsminute”]