\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>ith a trip to Florence booked, all I want is to rewatch Medici. The 2016 historical drama series tells of the rise of the powerful Florentine banking dynasty, and with it, the story of the Renaissance. Until recently, I could simply have gone to Netflix and found it there, alongside a wide array of award-winning and obscure titles. But when I Google the show in 2025, the Netflix link only takes me to a blank page. I don\u2019t see it on HBO Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, or any of the smaller streaming platforms. On Amazon Prime I am required to buy each of the three seasons or 24 episodes separately, whereupon they would be stored in a library subject to overnight deletion. Raised in the land of The Pirate Bay, the Swedish torrent index, I feel, for the first time in a decade, a nostalgia for the high seas of digital piracy. And I am not alone.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Guardian\u2019s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.\u00a0Learn more.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n For my teenage self in the 00s, torrenting was the norm. Need the new Coldplay album on your iPod? The Pirate Bay. The 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet? The Pirate Bay. Whatever you needed was accessible with just a couple of clicks. But as smartphones proliferated, so did Spotify, the music streaming platform that is also headquartered in Sweden. The same Scandinavian country had become a hub of illegal torrenting and simultaneously conjured forth its solution.<\/p>\n \u201cSpotify would never have seen the light of day without The Pirate Bay,\u201d Per Sundin, the then managing director of Universal Music Sweden, reflected in 2011. But music torrenting died out as we all either listened with ads or paid for the subscription. And when Netflix launched in Sweden in late 2012, open talk of torrenting moving images also stopped. Most of the big shows and a great collection of award-winning films could all be found for just 79 SEK (\u00a36) a month. Meanwhile, the three founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested and eventually jailed. Pirating faded into the history books as far as I was concerned.<\/p>\n In Sweden, 25% of people reported pirating in 2024 \u2013 a trend driven by 15-24-year-olds<\/p>\n A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer\u2019s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs<\/em> in hand (that\u2019s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the \u201censhittification\u201d of streaming \u2013 enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (\u00a315), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to \u20ac700 (\u00a3600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.<\/p>\n A fellow film critic confides anonymously: \u201cI never stopped pirating, and my partner also does it if he doesn\u2019t find the precise edition he is looking for on DVD.\u201d While some people never abandoned piracy, others admit they have recently returned \u2013 this time turning to unofficial streaming platforms. One commonly used app is legal but can, through community add-ons, channel illicit streams. \u201cDownloading is too difficult. I don\u2019t know where to start,\u201d says one film viewer. \u201cThe shady streams might bombard me with ads, but at least I don\u2019t have to worry about getting hacked or caught.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Life on the open seas \u2026 Swedish-based filesharing website The Pirate Bay.<\/span> Photograph: FocusDigital\/Alamy<\/p>\n According to London\u2011based piracy monitoring and content\u2011protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.<\/p>\n \u201cPiracy is not a pricing issue,\u201d Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world\u2019s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. \u201cIt\u2019s a service issue.\u201d Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.<\/p>\n Whether piracy today is rebellion or resignation is almost irrelevant; the sails are hoisted either way. As the streaming landscape fractures into feudal territories, more viewers are turning to the high seas. The Medici understood the value linked to access. A client could travel from Rome to London and still draw on their credit, thanks to a network built on trust and interoperability. If today\u2019s studios want to survive the storm, they may need to rediscover that truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With a trip to Florence booked, all I want is to rewatch Medici. The 2016 historical drama series tells of the rise of the powerful Florentine banking dynasty, and with it, the story of the Renaissance. Until recently, I could simply have gone to Netflix and found it there, alongside a wide array of award-winning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4875,9240,1040,463,1399,2781,9241,3982],"class_list":{"0":"post-15712","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-driving","9":"tag-impoverished","10":"tag-pay","11":"tag-piracy","12":"tag-services","13":"tag-streaming","14":"tag-viewers","15":"tag-wont"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}