Disney is looking to strengthen its ‘Piracy Intelligence’ team, presumably as part of an effort to tighten its grip on Disney Plus’ content library.
Disney Plus launched in the US, Canada and the Netherlands last week, and it will become available in Australia and New Zealand on November 19 − that’s this Tuesday. Unfortunately though, the streaming service won’t come to the UK and many, many other markets until 2020.
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It’s inevitable that lots of Disney fans who are based in areas where Disney Plus isn’t yet available will, for the time being, pirate Disney Plus-exclusive shows like The Mandalorian and The World According to Jeff Goldblum.
Not necessarily because they want to watch Disney Plus for free, but because this is currently the only way they can actually access it.
Disney surely would have seen this coming and, just ahead of Disney Plus’ launch, it posted a job ad for a role in its Piracy Intelligence team (via TorrentFreak).
“The Piracy Intelligence team at The Walt Disney Studios … provides meaningful piracy insights to inform strategies that maximize revenue for the film and TV business and minimize the piracy impact,” the job description reads.
“The Piracy Intelligence team is looking for a Market Research & Data Analyst, who will be responsible for providing support to a variety of piracy intelligence initiatives to measure movie and TV viewing trends across digital media platforms.”
And so on.
With Disney Plus currently available in such few places, the Disney Piracy Intelligence team’s goal right now might not simply be case of stamping out piracy.
As TorrentFreak reports, in the past Netflix revealed that it uses piracy data to determine how much it should be charging customers, and what types of content various markets are most interested in.
“Piracy is a governor in terms of our price in high piracy markets outside the US,” Netflix’s CFO David Wells said back in 2015. “We wouldn’t want to come out with a high price because there’s a lot of piracy, so we have to compete with that.”
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With Disney Plus piracy rates likely to be sky high in most of the world for the foreseeable future, the company shouldn’t be short of data.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
