In 2015, Apple was at the top of the box office charts with over 300 million paid admissions, and with the growth in streaming and downloads, over the past year, we are witnessing a similar trend happening with movie downloads (for the moment, I am referring to movies, TV shows, and music). The good news is that the number of movie downloads from these platforms is increasing every day (just take a look at the chart below).
This is the current number of movie downloads from streaming services, and this is only the beginning and just because we are seeing more movies being downloaded is not an indication that this is the end. Just look at the number of movies now being downloaded from Netflix and Amazon Prime.
That’s right, the number of movies that are currently being downloaded is much bigger than any of us were able to see before. What’s happening is that there are millions of people who don’t have the time or money to download movies and tv shows, but this is changing and the future is looking great for this.
I would like to take a step back and point out that this is not a new trend. In fact, there have been movie downloads before, and it is not that big a trend. I personally love watching movies and tv shows, and I am not seeing a rise in the number of titles being downloaded. Its a huge trend, but it is not the end of the world.
Movie downloads are actually down in recent years. A Pew Research study found that in 2008, a whopping 12% of American adults were willing to download a movie. In 2011, that number was down to 9%. However, the trend has reversed in the last year, and in 2015 it was at its highest point since the first study was done.
The average download time for an individual is somewhere around 30 minutes. It is hard to tell where it’ll end up if you try to download for a short time, but once you get to a certain point, you’ll have a pretty rough estimate of how much time it will take you. For example, in 2012, we had an average download time of 27 minutes, but in 2012 it was only 23.5 minutes, which is down from 27.9 minutes per one year.
In the same way that we try to make sure they download our content quickly, we try to make sure they don’t take too long to load or get interrupted. The good news is that with the rapid increase in the number of files, it’s not as hard as it used to be. We see a spike in the number of files once a week, but the majority of the time it’s just a few files that take a long time to download.
The current system for the distribution of download time is broken. As a result, the majority of our downloads are in the hundreds of megabytes. And as we see a spike in the number of files on a weekly basis, we try to ensure that the majority of our downloads are less than a minute.
With the current system, this can be achieved. But there are a select few sites where it’s not. For instance, if a user on a site downloads a file for only a few hours, they are making a mistake. The file still takes a long time to download, but the number of people downloading it is much lower. By the time it’s received by the site, it’s probably already been downloaded by many other users.
The reason for this is that when you hit the download button on a file that’s only a few megabytes in size, you need a lot of bandwidth to download it. Since most of our links are from sites that will happily accept a few megabytes of bandwidth to download them, we have to do a lot of work to get links from sites that will take a bit less than a minute to download.