Page views of sites showing pirated live TV streams rose by 61% in 2011

"New research from Google and PRS for Music reveals that unauthorised live TV streams are the biggest form of web piracy in the UK, and the fastest growing.
The study, which is the biggest of its kind to date, reveals that in the last year alone, illegitimate live TV streaming has shot up by 61 per cent with just over half of the sites examined by Google and PRS offering links to live TV streams.
The report notes that these sites reap a lot of traffic from social networks as well as offering robust mobile sites.
Premier League football streams seem to be driving this growth, prompting the FA to get involved in the research by providing a list of sites it suspects of infringement.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), PRS, Publishers Association and UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE) all provided suspects for the examination which was carried out by BAE Systems Detica.
As well as the live streams, P2P file sharing is still on the up – page views of P2P sites are up 17 per cent from February 2011 to February 2012."

Source:  Report by PRS and Google, reported by TechRadar, 2nd July 2012

Note:  Terminology & definitions from the report:  

"This segment contains 33% of the sites examined and is the fastest growing segment, with an average increase in global page views of around 61% (in the twelve month period studied). The segment is mid-high in terms of volume when compared to the other segments with up to 1.1M unique UK users per month on one site alone.

• The sites offer links to streams of live free-to-air and pay TV. 

• These sites offer above average levels of games and eBooks, as well as other content in lower proportions, but their stand out feature is live TV. 

• The sites typically provide links to downloads or streams. The content is centrally hosted (as opposed to using P2P) in a different location from the site.

• Predominately advertisement funded with some donations. 67% have adverts with 86% of those ads served by networks not affiliated with the Ad Choices scheme.

• Typically free to the user.

• Rapid growth in last year.

• Most likely to have a mobile site and a social networking presence. 

• Compared to the other segments Live TV Gateway has very high levels of direct access and referrals from social networks. It also has the highest level of social network presence. Search referral, albeit to a lesser degree, is also above average in this segment.

• More of these sites are in the US than any other single country"

Full report here