Some months ago, we decided to carry out a research on film piracy in The Philippines. To do this we tried to find out as much films on YouTube as we could. The results are quite alarming…

Introduction
This research started back in January when we found out many leaked Filipino movies on YouTube. At first we thought it was going to be hard to find more recent movies uploaded to the platform but soon we realized that we were wrong. After a quick search we discovered 3 channels with more than 10 films. After weeks research we were shocked about the results. We also want to make clear that we are not going to publish information about the channels or name film titles so they don’t get more views.

Results

So far, we found out 113 Channels with illegal uploads. Almost half of them (43%) have between 1 – 10 uploads and 57% have so many uploaded films that we were unable to extract all the information we would have wanted.

From those channels that we did extract information we found 145 films uploaded. Most of them (63%) are from the last ten years (2019-2009) and 37% belongs to movies produced before the 2009.

The total number of views accumulated by those 145 films is 109.122.451 views which is quite shocking. And even more socking is that 1 film got 22% of the total views (24.390.893 views). At least 14 titles were uploaded at least twice. Two titles were uploaded 4 times.

When we looked at the uploads by year, we found out that most of the films (87 %) were uploaded in the last 2 years.

As for the views per film, 30 films have more than 1 million views and 2 films have more than 10 million views.

The most shocking thing we discovered is that these titles were very easy to find, most uploads have the movie title in their Video Title or Description. Also the vast majority are from big Producer companies such as ABS-CBN and Viva Films, many have good quality meaning that they were copied from a DVD or Blu-Ray, probably bought in the streets of Metro Manila. There were only 2 uploads that were recorded inside a cinema and we know this because we can hear the people eating, coughing and laughing.

Looking forward
We urge local authorities to take immediately action against these channels, we are willing to cooperate with them by sending them the necessary information to report those accounts. On the other hand, we would also like to recommend ways to report those uploads in a quicker way, so producers and directors don’t have to fight through tons of online forms.

Update (May 11th):
Just minutes before publishing this article we counted the number of views again. In one week, the total number of views went up by 2,34 % or 2.548.353 new views. Another thing that we discovered is that 10 videos were taken down, some by the user (because the channels are still up) and another because producers report the videos for copyrights.