The end of torrents era in Russia

In 2018, Russia’s piracy market shifted decisively from torrents to streaming through pirate CDNs, with 80% of films and nearly 90% of TV series viewed online; Group-IB notes about 15 such providers (four major) operating vast infrastructures (petabytes of data, ~$100k monthly costs) that automate content seeding and domain churn. Legal measures enabling rapid blocking of mirror sites and search engine deindexing, coupled with an anti-piracy cooperation memorandum, reduced visibility, yet pirates quickly adapt—supported by illicit advertising—while demand remains high (nearly 10 billion annual searches).