Timur Vorona, CEO of Creators Media Group and editor-in-chief of ITC.ua, gave an interview to Oleksandr Glushchenko, host and author of the YouTube channel «Perevozovka», where he discussed, among other things, the problems of piracy in Ukraine.
We are reproducing the main points in the article (the text has been minimally edited for readability) — below we have added the full interview.
Piracy — no longer fashionable
«5 years ago, no one paid for content at all. Everyone pirated — downloaded games and movies from torrents. Now the situation has changed… Piracy is no longer fashionable».
«When a person earns enough money — they will not spare 5–10 dollars for content. But to pay the same amount if your budget is 15.10 or 5 thousand hryvnias — is too expensive».
«ITC.ua has a very active commentary community. Over the past year, readers left 140 thousand comments on the site, and we strongly condemn piracy. One of the cases — a blog in which a person mentioned how «spiralized» Windows».
Hostile propaganda in pirated content
«My father lives in a village in the Kyiv region, where about a thousand people live: usually poor people who live on pensions plus some small part-time jobs. Some of them watch some cheap pirated OTTs and then start walking around the village (both before the war and now) with phrases like «who is a bomb maker», «not everything is so clear» and similar. This is how Russia has been spreading propaganda for years with these cheap OTTs».
«Another question — why not block it? Every Ukrainian government tries to create a register of banned sites. In theory, this seems to make sense, because indeed Russian propaganda and anti-Ukrainian sites should be blocked, but no one can stop an ordinary official working in a security agency from blocking a perfectly normal site and using it as a way to extort a bribe. Unfortunately, under any government — from Kuchma to Zelensky, business has been under pressure».
Note: On November 9, the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting listed 16 video services to the list of services of the aggressor state and banned their broadcast. The list also includes HD Rezka — according to Kantar in 2021-2022, this pirated online cinema was only once dropped from the list of the 25 most popular websites in Ukraine. According to Similarweb, in October 2023, Hdrezka.ag had 50 million visits (73% of the audience was from Ukraine), and Rezka.ag had 91 million visits, 51% of which were from Ukraine. For comparison, the most popular legal online movie theater in Ukraine, Megogo, has almost 16 million unique users per month according to Forbes.
In March 2024, Ukraine joined the international WIPO ALERT platform, where it will compile a list of websites that infringe intellectual property rights along with 14 other countries.
According to the latest data from Bloomberg, Ukraine ranks 6th in the top 10 countries in terms of pirated content consumption
Ukrainian-language content
«Unfortunately, before the full-scale war, and even before 2014, very little Ukrainian-language content was produced in Ukraine. Take all the well-known Ukrainian production studios and showbiz — most of them worked for Russia».