As Hollywood moves to fight online film piracy, newly released tracking results show that more and more users have large video files on their home computers, the New York Times reported.
The NPD Group, a market research company, found an increase of about 60 percent over last year in the number of households with video files of 150MB or larger, about the size needed to store a half-hour television program. And these households averaged about 16 such files, nearly twice as many as last year. The data come from monitoring computers of 40,000 volunteers.
Some files might have come from movie-downloading services like CinemaNow, said Russ Crupnick, president of NPD’s music and movies division. But others were clearly not obtained legitimately, he said, including many movies not yet shown in theaters.
