Here Are The Differences Between People Who Stream Unlicensed Content And People Who Don't

There are some big differences between people who stream unlicensed content online and people who don't.

Business Insider partnered with SurveyMonkey Audience to run a survey of 549 people around the country to get an idea of their streaming behavior and their opinions about unlicensed streaming - which, believe it or not, is generally legal, if often unpleasant.

Streaming unlicensed content is still relatively uncommon: Only about 14% of the survey's respondents said that they do this.

People who stream unlicensed content are younger than people who don't. Over half of unlicensed content streamers were between 18 and 29:

Streamers were slightly more likely to be male than non-streamers, with 56.5% of the unlicensed streamers being male, as opposed to 45.8% of the non-streamers. However, this effect was small, and could very well be the result of random variation in the survey sample.

Similarly, geographic location, income, and education level all had no significant relationship with whether or not respondents streamed unlicensed content. Respondents were no more or less likely to stream unlicensed content based on these characteristics, and so demographic factors other than age don't seem to matter much.

Unsurprisingly, people who stream unlicensed content are far more likely to think that this should not be illegal than people who don't.

There was a similar gap between the two groups when they were asked if they were worried about the legal repercussions of streaming unlicensed content. Those who do stream such content are much less likely to worry about the legal ramifications than those who don't:

There are a few reasons this gap could happen. One possibility is that such worries dissuade people from streaming illegally: Some of the non-streamers are afraid of getting caught, and this is why they don't get their content this way. Another possibility is that the experiences of people who stream unlicensed content, and who presumably have not yet gotten into legal trouble, have dampened their fears of the law, making them less worried.

Another question asked respondents if they thought that all content should be free. While the unlicensed content streamers were slightly more likely to agree with this idea, there was very little difference between the opinions of the two groups on this subject:

We also asked respondents about their legal streaming behavior: how they used services like Netflix and Hulu. While more than half of both unlicensed streamers and non-streamers said they did use a licensed content service, people who stream unlicensed content were far more likely to do so, with almost nine out of ten unlicensed content streamers using Netflix, Hulu or one of their competitors:

There are a couple possible explanations for this relationship. Earlier, we saw that people who stream unlicensed content were younger than people who didn't. It's possible that this group is generally more tech and internet savvy than people who don't stream illegally.

We also saw that the reason most people stream unlicensed content was that they couldn't find what they were looking for on a legitimate site:

Another question asked whether or not users of licensed sites shared their passwords to those accounts with people outside of their households. While fewer than ten percent of respondents who didn't stream unlicensed content did this, over a quarter of unlicensed streamers shared their passwords: