Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on June 04, 2008TV shows are by far the most wanted files via BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s fast becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading? Let’s find out, and take a look at this weeks “Most pirated TV-episodes” chart.
Nearly 50% of all the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time do so to download a TV show, with popular series such as “Lost” getting close to 10 million downloads per episode. These figures are getting awfully close to the viewer count on TV as reported by Nielsen, and they are still rising.
People are getting used to on-demand content. They simply want to watch their favorite shows whenever they want, wherever they want. To give some more insight into this growing phenomenon, and because Nielsen is not counting BitTorrent downloads, we decided to start a weekly report of the most downloaded TV shows on BitTorrent.
The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites. The timing is a bit unfortunate, since popular shows like Desperate Housewives, House and Greys Anatomy just had their season finale last week, but we are aiming to publish an updated list every week from now on.
Top Downloads May 25 – June 01
| Ranking | TV-show | |
| 1 | (1) | Lost |
| 2 | (5) | Battlestar Galactica |
| 3 | (new) | The Daily Show |
| 4 | (new) | The Colbert Report |
| 5 | (new) | So You Think You Can Dance |
| 6 | (new) | Top Chef |
| 7 | (new) | The Tudors |
| 8 | (new) | Men in Trees |
| 9 | (new) | The Ultimate Fighter |
| 10 | (new) | Greek |
To give an impression of how many downloads these shows can get, here is the list of the most downloaded TV episodes in 2007. The number of downloads reported here is for Mininova only, so these could easily quadruple if all large BitTorrent sites were taken into account.
Top Downloads 2007
| Ranking | TV-Shows (downloads most popular episode) |
| 1 | Heroes (2.439.154) |
| 2 | Top Gear (1.217.923) |
| 3 | Battlestar Galactica (706.209) |
| 4 | Lost (705.724) |
| 5 | Prison Break (608.487) |
| 6 | Desperate Housewives (457.805) |
| 7 | 24 (524.303) |
| 8 | Family Guy (522.839) |
| 9 | Dexter (435.670) |
| 10 | Scrubs (427.420) |
The increasing popularity of these series on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks is a signal that customers want something that they can’t get somewhere else. It is all about availability. This is not a threat to TV studios, but rather an opportunity.
Please note, correct ‘Digg’ link is here
Previously: Pirates Slowly Killing MediaDefender
Next: EZTV and MVGroup Join Forces
60 Responses
they’ll see it as a threat to their existence. they also don’t understand we don’t want to watch tv shows in a browser in lackluster quality.
i honestly don’t care so much about watching a lower-quality video in a browser, being used to youtube and such, as i do being able to simply VIEW the show! take survivor for instance. for some reason, it kept loading ads over and over instead of the show because there was a problem with the player and had to refresh a few times. and when it did load the episode, it was entirely too buffer-happy to be viewable. and letting it load a while didn’t seem to help. i don’t have a slow connection, it just seemed the day after the episode the server is swamped. if they’re gonna have their stuff online, they at least need servers to handle it. which is why i go back to BT
Why the crap are the Daily Show and the Colbert Report so popular here? They’re available to watch for free on their respective websites… legally… for free… and streaming a hell of a lot faster than it takes to download them. And when it comes to online programs, there are surprisingly few commercials.
@TheYunvus its mainly a quality issue, main stream people using the internet do not get quality, and cannot tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and FLAC audio. People also want to be able to watch them in a media player that suits them and not the company making the application that shares the TV. And streaming can be seen as slower due to more people downloading the less bandwidth the tv show has for me!
The daily show and colbert report are not fully available for free, they have clips, they don’t stream the whole episode.
hahaha. imagine how ratings will go up bittorrent users where added. LOL, anyway piracy is a good thing, it helps stop global warming. Confused? click here: http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii13/xplicit_2008/piracyhelpsglobalwarming.jpg
Just wait until the next season of Stargate Atlantis comes out!
Wow great to see some a UK show on the list.
My favourites are Top Gear (UK), Heroes and Lost.
In the UK we pay a licence fee so I don’t see it as wrong to download and watch TV progs on p2p.
http://www.Dargens.com
Anonymous p2p
YES
Stargate Atlantis
is coming out soon.
I always download the episode that I can’t see then buy the series.
Put two adverts at the front and two in the middle, then put it up free for download, for that little amount of adverts no one will be ARSED to remove and re-upload them!!!
Anyone see the presentation done a bit back about how much more money can be made by cutting out the broadcasters? Interesting vid.
Good idea keeping a list of tv shows, but given the sheer number of shows released every week, maybe a top 25 list would be better. And it might be interesting to see a count of the number of downloads or requests.
Thanks guys, keep up the good work.
thanks, would like some from other sites(tvtorrents.com)
“for that little amount of adverts no one will be ARSED to remove and re-upload them!!!”
Wanna bet? lawl =]
P.S. “Here it is – your moment is in!”: Dunno bout in Merka, but elsewhere ‘The Daily Show’ & ‘Colbert’ CANNOT be downloaded from their respective sites…
@ Monsignor Larville Jones M.D.
It’s “moment of zen”. :)
Well, this will be better next year, most of the “good” shows are post- season-finale. Lost, House, Smallville, Sara Connors Chronicles, ect are not coming back on for quite some time.
-=R=-
Note the lack of NBC shows. Could this be a sign that Hulu is a success?
how did you get the download numbers? where do you compile these numbers from? really interesting.. but confusing///
@16 Something on NBC’s worth watching? The Office is over and there’s nothing else.
@ #14: My sincerest of apologies – you’re right, by Jingo!
@ #18: If you’re talking about the UK version, then fine. If you’re mayhap alluding to the Merkin version, then you can simply blow me. No offence…
what NBC,CBS and ABC dont realize that torrenting, or better yet live streaming is a VAST untapped market that they or anyone with the intelligence to set up a site to do this are losing out on some serious $$$$
but that is just my take on things……….
keep it up guys. Finally, u have added a more important list than ur Top Movie Downloads. Whosever idea it was, hats to them!!! Thk u soooooooo much for all the effort u r putting to make TF so informative and useful.
Lost’s make sense, in 2007 it wasn’t back yet but it was still doing quite well. Then once it got started in Jan 2008 to end of May, you can see the piracy rate increase. EPIC WIN for a crappy season.
Not quite hypermiling
Gr8 to see TV shows list here.. Maybe we can even have a ‘Documentaries list’ … Keep it up TF guyz..
I want it,
I can’t get it at its source,
therefore i take it wherever i can.
Basic economic principle.
I like the fact that the person who wrote the article said that it is about availability. Finally someone has a brain and understands that when tv shows aren’t available that is why I use Bittorrent.
I just wish bigger companies like MPAA understood this. I hate when you go to a website and it says Sorry The Content Is Not Available In Your Area.
I live in France and there is currently *no* legal way to watch the current season of certain TV shows. Either you have to wait more than 1 year to see the show appear on TV or the show is dubbed in French which makes it impossible to watch. Watching a dubbed show is like watching a bad quality 1980s soap opera!
What happened recently was that a channel (NRJ 12) started to air Battlestar Gallactica (season 1!). But since another channel (M6) had bought the rights for the 2 first episodes, well, they couldn’t air the two first episodes. So BSG in France is season 1 only without the 2 first episodes!
Well, I can tell you this. There is no way in hell I either have the will, nor the time to live my life after some bloody TV-stations notion on when to view TV-shows. I work to much.
tv blows. all those shows suck balls. 24 is for gays.
^^ mature
Isn’t creating a list like this just going to point the forces of darkness in this direction for who to “hit” next?
I’m pretty sure they’ll use a site like this as a source of easy targets to go for with peer trackers.
@ Martin
That sounds very frustrating… I’m glad you can use p2p to fill in the gaps!
It’s like I said in a previous post about virgin media… after an argument with sky, they pulled the sky one channel (the one that shows new simpsons, lost, battlestar galactica, prison break, etc).
Then, after getting their customers hopes up by stating that it would return, they replace it with their own channel which mainly consisists of re-runs of police chase shows…GRRR!
…and all this without ajusting the customers bill to compensate for the loss of the best channel.
If it wasn’t for it’s customers using Virgin broadband to download these episodes, I really believe that more viewers would have migrated to another provider.
So, there you have it… p2p saved Virgin medias ass(ets)!
Some of the best hardcore gay tv shows and porn from our favorite bitorrent.
could you tell us the representative sample pleeease?
I’d like to know which sites you’re getting these from…
The thing is- Colbert Report and The daily show don’t have much of a resale value.
Besides a “Best Of DVD” of some sort.
Might as well give them away for free…
Dexter is an awesome show, can’t wait for the new season.
Just wanted to chime in and mention I download Doctor Who every week from Bittorrent – the Scifi channel in the US is two or three episodes behind the BBC.
Wow. I almost download everything on this list :)
Sad bastard
I watch Lost and many other shows on there website in HD for free. Commercial free with adblocker.
All you need to do is hook your laptop up to the widescreen tv and steam a show and it looks great. I find it to be a waste of time to download these shows when they are free to watch online anyway.
I find the phrase “pirated TV” an oxymoron… they’ve broadcasted the stuff,through the air,at no direct cost,for the last, what, 60ish years? How can you pirate or steal something they give away to anyone with a receiver?
We just use non-traditional methods to timeshift our weekly shows to fit our lifestyle and hardware. We don’t sell them, we don’t make money, we watch and delete. I have never understood the inability to put that together on their part…
bob.
You download instead of stream to view them on your MediaPC or stream them to your Xbox360 and watch on your TV rather than some tiny(relatively) ass monitor.
i play shows on a big HD tv I have via an adapter for my laptop. No commercials is sweet. i pretty much don’t watch reg or cable tv anymore. oh and for the guy saying something about abc, cbs, nbc, etc I think they all have streaming video with very short commercial breaks…
Pretty good considering only one episode of Top Gear has aired since Christmas!
never thought of this.
*going to the pirate bay to download episodes
We dropped cable TV about two years ago. Don’t miss it at all. You will free up so much time when just use bit torrent. No more wasting your night watching “nothing”
Wow. All I got from this is that people ( minus BSG, Lost, and not including last years results ) have a terrible taste in TV shows.
Main reason I torrent my shows are:
A) NZ is waaaay behind on some shows
and
B) While some may be available streaming over the web, I now watch about 50% of my TV in the gaps and downtime I have, like catching the bus/train to work. The rest of the time I’m too busy.
So the paradigm that TV execs need to shift to is ‘What I want – How I want – When I want – Where I want’. Geez, I sound like some whining Millenial now…:-(
Only reason i bitoerrent shows is because our country is so far behind the us for things like prison break, lost and heroes.
@41
what are you talknig about? they dont give it for free, they get paid for you watching their annoying adverts…thats how they make money. Albeit were not making money from watching and deleting but if ratings dropped, advertisement revenues would drop and the shows would be cancelled.
We don’t even get the Comedy Channel or Fox network in my country (but we get 3 lifetime networks…WTF!!!) so I use EZTV for my TV downloads.
Shame Supernatural isn’t on there.
@41-
Sure, it’s free to watch over-the-air because of commercials. Most (all?) bittorrent downloads don’t have commercials. The companies feel like they’re not making any revenue off bittorrent downloads and, thus, you are doing something wrong.
Here’s where I get confused: You can watch it off-the-air for free. You can record it on a DVD recorder. That’s legal. You can take out the commercials and give it to a friend. That’s legal. You could transfer it from your Tivo, cut out the commercials, burn it to a DVD (or your portable device of choice) and THAT’S legal. But if you download it over bittorent, that’s NOT legal.
The only shows on any of those lists worth watching are Heroes and 24. All the other shows are not worth the time to film them.
I think any new show on TV should be sold with three seasons in text format and one show in the can. If you want to sell it use your own money make the first show with your own dime.
Thats how I see it.
Thanks to torrents the TV show lag in my country has become significantly shorter over the last couple of years.
Lost for example: first heard of it from my friends who downloaded the episodes as soon as they were out in the US. Took a year before they landed on the TV sets here (and probably thanks to torrenting the show got quite a bit of buzz here even before it started airing). This year, season finale was aired one week after the US premiere – unheard of just a couple of years back! (apparently someone realized they’d just lose out on all the ad money targeting the very lucrative young adult audience otherwise)
As a novelty experiment, you can also pay to watch newest episodes of a bunch of shows online by a few local networks, but the price is ouchy at 3€ or so for DRM:ed streaming – but as a usually law-abiding citizen, if the price was right I’d prefer to take this option to hunting down the torrents.
Now, if only the TV bosses would understand kids today are far more globalized and spoiled to demand anything but instant gratification for their cultural needs and that their old world distribution models need to adapt or die fighting…
The only reason Heroes isn’t on the first list is because the season hasn’t started yet. When it does, I bet it’ll easily beat 10 mil/episode.
I pay for payTV sci-fi channel, I pay ISP for bandwidth and I want to watch episodes at my convenience. Does anyone lose here?
Personally, I download “Ice Road Truckers”, “Deadliest Catch”, “Ax Men”, “The Universe”, “Battle 360″, and “Dogfights”.
I quit watching BSG after the second season.
To be honest, http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html that guy has a great idea! Piracy IS good.
Family Guy?! Come on peeps… Nice overview of the biggest tvshows ;)
you’re all silly ;p
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