50% Of All BitTorrent Downloads are TV-Shows
Written by Ernesto on February 14, 2008Reports 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.
Previously: Danish Pirate Bay Block Breaks EU Law
Next: New and Promising BitTorrent Sites
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holy crap. impressive numbers! tracker stats are gonna put Neilson out of business.
Is the percentage of pr0n incorporated in the categories of movies and pictures? I find it somewhat hard to believe that it would fall under “other” taking into account how much of the data transfer over the net that is pr0n or pr0n related.
I refused to bullied by a box, which is why I won’e waste my time to “tuning in” at the specified time. I refuse to hold my pee. And I refuse to “schedule” recordings on a stand-alone device with little other use. All in all, TV is an excellent example of how torrent help sales. While I don’t like spending money, certain shows of ridiculously high quality writing, such as Arrested Development or Mr. Show, I have gone out and purchased them all. Lots of Adult Swim. Some things you just have to own. Pity there are so few.
50% for TV sounds very logical to me given that most of the world does not have direct access to premium TV content, either being anime or american shows/series/cartoons.
Here in greece there is no legal way of watching most of the good stuff I like (Colbert Report, Burn Notice) and of course no freaking way to watch anime. Given that most of europe is in the same state, add russia to the equation and HEY you got 50% of global bittorrent traffic.
If TV networks don’t like torrents of their shows, they should just offer them online exactly as they are broadcasted (with ads and everything) in high quality to EVERYONE. This might halve the torrent traffic.
there is a downside though.
I too download quite some TV-shows after their first airing. But is has a downside for the “industry” none the less. It’s not just free promotion and it doesn’t boost DVD sails (at least not for me). However I never watch the (to me) old episodes when they finally arrive in my country (years later!?!) and hence cut the viewing statistics and ultimately the advertisement and popularity ratings for the shows we prefer to watch “early”.
Therefore these (international) early adoptors using bittorrent drop out of the statistics from the international market as well. But even more, they show a striking point that the industry is missing totally in their old fashioned distribution scemes: There are litterally MILLIONS of customers who are sick of waiting month and years till the fat and lazy companies finally manage to provide their stuff - and take the fast and easy p2p-shortcut!
The sleepy heads in the executive suites just don’t get it!
75% of the content on my NAS are TV shows… American, Canadian and UK.
I’m guessing the lack of content from other countries reflects the poor quality of their product.
I agree with #2 aka Bottles.
Where is pornography figured into that pie chart. Movies? If so I think you have underestimated actual Movies. If it is the “Other” category, again I think the number is grossly underestimated.
@ 4 - Contrary to popular belief, BT usage within the US (even though we can see the shows as they air) is extremely high also. TiVo costs money and BT is so much more convenient to use than a DVR IMO.
You can d/l, watch, archive, and wait for the boxsets to be released :)
This report doesn’t surprises me in the least. Considering the amount of TV shows between the US, Australia and the UK that get put online on a daily basis, there is automatically a higher number of ‘files’ and shows to choose from, thus having a wider appeal to audiences.
is it taboo to use the word “porn”?
re: # 8 - I forgot to add Canadian TV shows into the mix as well. Sorry to all our Canadian BT brethren ;)
[quote comment="289123"]I agree with #2 aka Bottles.
Where is pornography figured into that pie chart. Movies? If so I think you have underestimated actual Movies. If it is the “Other” category, again I think the number is grossly underestimated.[/quote]
Adult content is not included in the Mininova graph, but it was in our earlier analysis linked in the post (8%).
@6:
I don’t think it’s poor quality. It’s mostly because the english ones tend to have more of an international audience in mind, while local ones (wherever they might be) have a local audience in mind.
Same goes for movies (at least where i live it does).
Almost agreeing with you: english speaking TV shows have a very big audience, thus more expensive commercials, thus more money into their production, thus more “oomf”. But money don’t make up for talent (except if you find and hire one). Take for instance Night Watch, a russian $4mil budget movie which excels in almost every aspect. Hollywood has just snatched the director who is now shooting (or cutting) Wanted, a multi-million budget action film.
Talent is everywhere, we are just not in their range.
tivo needz to dai plz.
btw, is there an alternative version of tvrss.net + miro? I mean same functionality, does not need to be free.
As long as I know, tivo needs you to setup each episode and does not have advanced filters (with tvrss i get all the pilots posted in a matter of hours).
On the other hand i think that my question is pointless, cause even if it existed, it would be bound to one region/country.
And thats just one tracker, it would be intreasting to see if stats were similar for smaller private trackers.
Sooner or later, there will be no reason to have a satellite anymore :)
This is exactly what I’ve been doing for about 2 years now. I got rid of cable TV primarily because I didn’t want to pay for programming that I thought was dangerous for my family; Ads that were nearly pornographic, TV series that were super violent, ect.
No now, I download 3 programs per week (Lost, Survivor and The Apprentice) and we watch it on a PC running Media Portal (way better than Microsoft Media Center, and free) and that’s it. No ads, we watch on our schedule and it’s free. Love it.
I think it does boost ratings if anyone is like me….
When I first saw Heroes I told my family/friends how awesome it was and too watch it when it eventually comes out so -1 + 30 = +29 viewers….
lol
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
that may be so but wait till hundreds of corporations start saying they are loosing money because people are downloading their shows and not spending the time on tv watching crappy tv comercials.
How long will it be before coke, snuggle softener and many other companies cry that they are faced with an impact because of TV filesharing.
Has anybody that does not live in Australia seen the new Australian drama Underbelly yet. I’m just interested to see how it is doing oversears.
Well…
http://forum.eztv.it/index.php?forum=view_thread&tid=9135
agreed with #6 here in nz we actually have a really good system where you can download our local shows for free off of the national broadcasting site but to be honest we have maybe one good show made here (and its aired on another network so cant be downloaded for free) i have pirated versions of every copy of scrubs and bought the box sets when they have come out funnily enough the season six set came out before it had finished airing we usualy lagg behind you us guys in the series so its easier to download if only we could get all shows on our national network on the site it would be huge
@19; I don’t see any reason why Coke, and other companies would cry due to TV filesharing. Advertisers will go where the audience is. They might cry if EZTV turns down their offer of millions of dollars in advertising but hey, supply and demand baby.
My vision of the future is a such: someone has a brilliant idea for a TV show and wants it to air, but not on a TV network, what’s the point in that? No, if they can get companies to spend advertising dollars directly on their show (and many advertisers do this already - anyone seen the super bowl?) they may as well package up their “TV show” and send it to a torrent distributer who happily uploads the file, high quality, with ads in it. The advantage of the ad version? High speed servers doing the seeding of course…
Let’s cut out the middle man. When television networks are a thing of the past it won’t be soon enough…
I don’t buy music anymore, rarely buy movies, but I’m a big tv and buy alot of boxsets. I love being able to watch my tv shows when i want and not have to plan my day around them thanks to bittorrent
i’ve downloaded all those file types before niggga
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