Reports show that 50% of all people using BitTorrent at any given
point in time do so to download TV-series, quite an impressive number.
In total, over a billion TV-shows are downloaded every year, and this
number continues to rise.
It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Some
episodes of popular TV-shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and
“Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over
hundreds of sites. This number is getting awfully close to the average
number of viewers on TV in the US. However, the major difference is
that the BitTorrent “viewers” come from all over the world.
In January TorrentFreak published the list of “most downloaded
TV-shows“, where we showed that the most popular episode of “Heroes”
was downloaded 2.5 million times on Mininova alone. Even more
impressive -across all BitTorrent sites- more than a billion episodes
are downloaded every year worldwide.
The graph below shows the percentage of .torrent files per category
downloaded on Mininova over the last 2 years - over 40 percent are
TV-shows. To support this, we analyzed a sample of 400,000 torrents
earlier this year. That data indicated that approximately half of all
the people using BitTorrent at any given point in time, were using it
to download a TV-show.
The popularity of TV-torrents hasn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, there
are reports of TV-studios that allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing
tool, by leaking unaired pilots intentionally. While the movie and
music studios continue to fight their “war on piracy”, most of the
TV-studios lay low.
On the contrary, Anne Sweeney -the president of the Disney-ABC
television group- admitted that she was “inspired” after seeing a
pirated copy of the hit-show “Desperate Housewives”. The pirated copy
of this popular TV show was the main reason (besides the money) for
Disney to sell their shows online. “Coming ‘face to face’ with the
high-quality, commercial-free pirated version (of Desperate Housewives)
told Disney that it was not just competing with other broadcasters, but
with digital pirates and as such was an experience that prompted us to
do the iTunes deal with Apple.” Sweeney said at the time.
BitTorrent’s popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed by actors either. Masi
Oka who plays Hiro Nakamura in the popular show “Heroes”, made some
pro-BitTorrent comments earlier this year. When he was in France to
promote the series (before they aired), he was surprised to see how
many people had already seen the show thanks to BitTorrent. Oka said
that BitTorrent is a great promotion tool, but added “Hopefully, if
they can buy the DVD after they watch it on BitTorrent, that would be
great.”
One of the members of EZTV, the leading TV-torrent distribution
group, told TorrentFreak in an earlier interview that he doesn’t think
their work has a negative impact on the TV-industry either. “The only
possible impacts can see are positive ones,” Boggibill said “it is free
publicity, which may lead to higher ratings when people “discover” new
shows and also larger numbers of DVD purchases - it is my understanding
that many of the people that download TV shows from us are avid TV fans
and will usually buy DVD boxsets of shows they like.”
A factor that plays a role in the rise of unauthorized downloading
of TV-shows is that most people simply don’t see it as stealing. It is
a signal that customers want something that is not available through
other channels and it’s more about availability than the fact that it’s
free. It’s not a threat, but more an opportunity. Seems as if the
majority of our visitors come here for the movies. Since %50 of
torrents are tv shows, what do our readers suggest to attract this
segment who could find our site useful ?
source, author: Ernesto
