According to a recent study from NDP group, a consumer and retail information company, the number of legally downloaded videos online are outnumbered 5 to 1 by illegal downloaded videos from P2P networks and BitTorrent sites.

Some quick facts:

Legal video downloads were mainly from:

• Apple iTunes – 90%
• Vongo – 5%
• MovieLink - 3%
• CinemaNow – less than 1%

Illegally downloaded video consists of:

• 60% were adult orientated
• 20% were TV Shows
• 5% were mainstream movies

Legal downloaded video consists of:

• 62% were TVshows
• 24% were music
• 6% were Movie

With regards to the last statistic of what most legal video downloads are, this is pretty inaccurate since it has completely ignored legal adult video downloads and so must only be taking data from places like iTunes and CinemaNow which don’t sell much adult content. Paid adult downloaded video will still make up a high percentage of legal downloads, but is much harder to track due to the number of adult video outlets on the internet. I estimate the figure to be anywhere from 25 – 50%.

I personally think that illegal downloads being 5x more common than legal ones is conservative. The actual figure may be a lot higher, and is it any surprise given the benefits of illegal video over legitimate video downloads. No DRM and a cheap price tag makes illegal downloads a lot more attractive.

[Via TorrentFreak]