How Much does Illegal Streaming Cost?

From U.S. Senator Thom Tillis.

“The shift toward streaming content online has resulted in criminal streaming services illegally distributing copyrighted material that costs the U.S. economy nearly $30 billion every year, and discourages the production of creative content that Americans enjoy”

It certainly makes sense for the government to act against large-scale, commercial, copyright-infrigning streaming services. These estimations of the cost to the U.S. economy that online piracy represents have always struck me as highly dubious, however.

$30 billion per year? For context, that’s roughly equivalent to the combined revenues of Netflix and YouTube for 2019¹. Is there really another Netflix + YouTube sized subscriber base out there that would be willing to pay for these services if only some of the same content weren’t available elsewhere for free?

I doubt it.

In reality I suspect these illegal services are bad for a handful of specific, very large companies, but drastically less so than they would like you to believe. And essentially neutral to the economy as a whole.