The circles are peer swarms for a particular pirated instance of this film, with size of circle proportionate with the number of peers. A 3-peer swarm is much smaller than a 200-peer swarm. The peer swarm is colored according to the resolution of the pirated instance, with 4k versions orange hued, 1080p versions purple hued, 720p versions blue, and standard definition instances green hued. Here’s the resolution/hue breakdown for the 2023 maps above.
More detailed peer counts and geospatial characteristics can be found in the data files permalinked below.
To the left (and mirror-flipped from the center of the image below) is the cumulative peer phenomena associated with Marvel’s 2023 release, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. This movie is the sequel to what is on the right half of the image, the cumulative peer phenomena associated with Marvel’s 2018 release, Black Panther.
What to make of these swarms, years apart, this persistent peer phenomena for the Black Panther universe? How to compare these two related media objects across 5 years of change in the world and on the greater internet?
- The left part of the image above is blue/purple indicating higher-definition piracy is the norm in 2023, as opposed to what was happening in 2018, where the majority of the piracy was lower-definition. On the continent of Africa, high definition piracy is now the majority.
- The biggest circles are centered in roughly the same places, aka Accra, Nairobi, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Cairo. But it does look like the North African peers from 2018 were overpowered by Southern African peers in 2023. Given the amount of fiber that went in to the continent around Accra in the last 5 years, the fast pace of South America/Africa fiber growth, and that this area (Nigeria/Ghana) is the only part of the African continent with Starlink ground stations circa June 2023… has generated the expectation that this part of Africa has among the highest connectivity outside of Cairo. Do demographics/population skew these swarms? Do recent political and civic developments in Ivory Coast countries contribute to smaller peer swarms (or correctly peer swarms that did not grow as fast as southern peer swarms did…)
- Data on intra-Africa fiber connectivity is more transparent than than for North America, with known interior routes in public. Mapping peer plus interior fiber routes with demographic info, in addition to oceanic submarine cable, would be enlightening.
- Sample length has changed over the last five years: Black Panther was sampled for 8 weeks, and Black Panther Wakanda Forever will be sampled for 26 weeks. The performance of the sequel at 8 weeks (13.6M unique peers) closely matched the original at 8 weeks (13.9M), and looks likely to finish in the top five largest cumulative peer swarms for all of 2023, probably topping out at 24.4M. These are large swarms, bound to be in yearly top-ten rankings.
- Getting back to sequential ratings… How to compare the “Black Panther Universe” pair of media objects (original/sequel) with a “Game of Thrones Universe” pair of media objects (original is Game of Thrones 806 / sequel is House of the Dragon 101) or a “Stranger Things Universe” tuple of media objects (original is Stranger Things 2 / sequel is Stranger Things 3 / sequel is Stranger Things 4.1 / sequel is Stranger Things 4.2). How does film media compare to streaming/tv media? What is the rate of decline for the three “Universe” objects?
- Africa is but a small part of global traffic. For the original there were a bit over a million African peers (7.7%), and for the sequel 8.7% (and 1.7M African peers). This about the same number of peers as China plus India, and half as many as Russia. Note that the China release date for Black Panther Wakanda Forever was a much-delayed February 7, 2023. This is about a week after it was first pirated, making the China swarm data particularly interesting…
- Peer sharing as a window into the distribution of USA cultural objects. Revisiting soft power, and the global reach of American media objects outside the USA. Without question, banning Marvel movies does not keep these media objects from being widely watched inside China, and may have the opposite effect. (Compare Black Panthers with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which never got a release date inside China?) Inside Russia, Disney pulling out of the country due to the Ukrainian War does not seem to impact the popularity of this movie on Russian pirate networks. Recent analytical advances allow the analysis of peer swarms from both the perspective of physical network (aka where the protocol packet is coming from) and from the perspective of the “registered country,” which is the country that owns or leases the local line where the packet transited. What patterns would be expected for North American vs. African foreign ownership? Are residual colonial/post-colonial or Cold-War era relationships expressed in telecom ownership or media flows?
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