A subtle but significant shift is underway on South Africa’s digital landscape. Recent network data from a major Internet Service Provider (ISP) suggests a potential reversal in a decade-long trend, signaling growing consumer frustration with the legal streaming market.
Franco Barbalich, Marketing Director at Axxess, reports a notable surge in BitTorrent traffic on the ISP’s network, doubling from 3% in 2024 to 7% in 2025. This peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, while having legitimate uses for distributing large open-source software or public domain content, is historically synonymous with the illegal sharing of copyrighted movies, series, and software.
This resurgence is particularly striking when contrasted with a concurrent decline in real-time streaming traffic—the category encompassing services like Netflix, Showmax, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. For years, these platforms were hailed as the solution to online piracy, offering convenience and value that lured users away from torrent sites. By 2019, streaming had decisively overtaken P2P traffic on South African networks, to the point where some ISPs stopped monitoring torrents altogether by 2024.
Why piracy refuses to die
The return to torrents is not merely a nostalgic relapse; it’s a direct response to fundamental flaws in the current streaming ecosystem. This trend aligns with global insights from MUSO’s 2024 Piracy Report, which identifies three core drivers:
- Content Fragmentation & Subscription Fatigue: The “Golden Age” of streaming, dominated by one or two comprehensive services, has splintered. Consumers now face a daunting array of platforms, each holding exclusive rights to must-see shows. The cost of subscribing to Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Showmax, and others to access scattered content is becoming prohibitive, often exceeding the price of a traditional premium TV package. Piracy becomes a unified, albeit illegal, aggregator.
- Geoblocking & Release Window Delays: South African audiences frequently face arbitrary delays in accessing global content. A show released in the US or UK may not arrive on a local platform for months, or a film may be unavailable due to complex licensing agreements. This “cultural timing gap” creates immediate demand that piracy instantly fulfills.
- Content Removal & Shrinking Libraries: Streaming libraries are no longer stable archives. As services lose licensing rights or purge content for tax write-offs, users see purchased access as transient. Downloading via torrents creates a personal, permanent copy.
South Africa’s improved internet infrastructure also plays a role. Widespread fibre rollouts and expanded data centre capacity mean networks can now handle the heavy load of P2P traffic without the throttling measures common a decade ago. While this is a positive development for overall connectivity, it inadvertently lowers the technical barrier to piracy. As noted, an unthrottled torrent download on a local office network can still consume significant bandwidth, highlighting that the capacity exists for this activity to scale.
MUSO’s crucial conclusion reframes the entire debate: “Piracy is a map of unmet audience demand.” South Africans are not inherently opposed to paying for content. The success of streaming from 2015-2023 proved that. Instead, the current pivot suggests that the legal market is failing to meet expectations on price, accessibility, and immediacy. When a consumer cannot find, afford, or timely access a desired show through any single legal avenue, they are pushed toward the one platform that has everything: the illegal ecosystem.
This is not just bad news for Netflix and its competitors; it’s a critical market signal. The solution is not stronger digital locks or harsher penalties, but more consumer-centric models. Potential industry responses could include renewed interest in aggregation services (like bundled streaming packages from ISPs), shorter global release windows, more transparent and stable licensing, and tiered pricing that acknowledges local purchasing power. The fate of legal streaming in South Africa depends on how quickly and effectively the industry reads this map of demand and charts a new course.