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
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103 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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porn is 70 percent of my downloads, anime, music and movies make up the rest, i don’t watch any american tv series
Why isn’t Anime included in TV shows and Movies? You know, it’s just animated TV shows and movies from Japan. Otherwise, there isn’t anything special about and it covers all genres from comedy, thrillers, sci-fi, drama to pr0n. Does “TV shows” solely refer to US American TV shows? And “Movies” means “US American Movies”?
I DL a few shows because I’m never at home in the evenings. If I owned a TV network I’d put all my shows up, with a few commercials still, on bittorent. I don’t understand why so few TV networks utilize the free distribution network that bittorrent provides.
I download TV shows because I don’t like commercials - I don’t see a point in someone trying to trick me into thinking I want to buy something.
Oh yes, it IS also about being free
Seems fairly accurate, over half of my downloads are TV shows that are not available otherwise.
The large section of Anime is more disturbing, whats that all about?
80% of what I download is porn. The rest is tv-shows.
So tr now that i think of it, who needs tivo when you’ve got utorrent? Would def recommend TVtorrents to anyone looking for a good private site to watch the latest and greatest hd shows.
Let me get this straight; Anne Sweeney saw a high-quality pirated DRM free copy of a TV show, in a generic format playable on any machine, and because of this she was inspired to offer lower-quality copies in a DRM crippled propietary format that can only be played on certain systems? Way to go!
I have a DVR as part of my AT&T U-Verse service, but I still prefer to watch copies off the net. Why? The DVR only offers two levels of Fastforward and rewind. An AVI in Media Player Classic allows me to jump to any point in the show instantly, or even do frame step if I want to.
Then there are the shows I can’t even watch here in the US, like Primeval, a British SF show.
As for ratings; It doesn’t matter if most people watch pirated copies of the shows. If you aren’t a Neilson family in the US, or part of a ratings group in other countries, watching a show doesn’t mean crap because you’re not being counted!
That said, the networks should put up good quality, DRM free copies of the shows on their web sites, with the same commercials they have when they’re broadcast. I’d happily download a copy with commercials, if it was legal, free and unrestricted. “Live” TV is like that anyway. Sure, I would probably skip the commercials, but it’s not like I pay attention to them while watching TV anyway.
Why tape/record/burn at tv show when I can download it the next day…in fact you could almost get rid of cable, but at least I don’t feel guilty about downloading something I could have recorded myself.
why i download tv-shows?
1. cable/pay-tv is too expensive and sat is not allowed here in my flat.
2. no ads
3. can watch it asap, not 2 years later in bad synced version
4. can watch it when/where i want
5. only way to get it in english and in 720p!
btw. i’m from austria too ;-)
@45
[quote comment="289691"]smug self-righteous jackass … take your pseudo-morality and shove it back [/quote]
What’s wrong with you? You feel pissed because someone doesn’t glorify watching porn and says, it becomes boring by the time?
If all you do is watching porn, then well: just enjoy it!
Most people just seem not to belong to that group that enjoys watching essentially the same stuff over and over again.
You feel the urgent need to express your desire to use bittorrent for 80% of porn consumption, as several people here felt obliged to stress as well? So what?
Then the numbers should just tell you that other people obviously have better things and more interesting stuff to do (from their point of view) in their lives than to join your “hobby”.
He wrote:
[quote comment="289513"]Ever seen a porn movie with tenthousends of peers? Nope - not gonna happen! Popular TV shows yield that every week! And simply dwarf porn![/quote]
If you feel to have to retaliate with insulting and dispraising, just because someone said, using bittorrent the way you favour it isn’t the way all others do, it only supports what he wrote: poor boy!
If you feel the need to state that you consume 80% porn, don’t expect others to be impressed by that … or even respect you for your inferior language later on - they might just as well despise you for what you are shouting out to the world either way.
Learn to deal with opposing opinions propperly - or be regarded as pathetic for a good reason!
I think if you’re bright and motivated to find whatever you can for free in this life, be it online or real-world, you should be commended. Does the notion of a ‘windfall’ not exist anymore? What’s the difference between the wind that knocks over a tree and an uploader? None as far as I can tell. Both forces of nature. Finders keepers, people!
I also d/l tv shows, currently keeping up with “Supernatural”. Most of the time it’s because my girlfriend and I were introduced to a show that’s already on so we buy some on DVD and use BitTorrent to catch up on the rest, plus using the Comcast DVR (their “HD” service blows, btw). We playback much of the d/l’ed shows through our xbox360.
I use tvrss.net or the private tracker tv.torrents.ro for my show selection.
Should traditional tv go south or the advertising system change due to less and less normal viewers, studios could pick up independent filmmakers to create shows and re-design ads to appear in the lower third (or quarter) of the screen so they can’t be easily removed and are still viewed even when downloaded through BT.
It’s just a matter of adapting the current tv system to meet the changes in technology and demand of your global audience.
Buying tv show box sets is still a good idea because that way you get the extra features not present in downloaded episodes.
http://arlof.com/
[quote comment="289120"]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”.[/quote]
Actually, at least where I live, TV studios have been fighting quite hard to buy the rights for US shows. As an example. One of the major networks as just bought ‘Cashmere Mafia’, and they only aired 4 or 5 shows… Your statement was true, 2 or 3 years ago. But things are changing. Bittorrent is improving the profits of american tv-studios. They manage to sell their stuff much more quickly to foreign countries. And networks actually battle to get all the “best shows”.
I don’t see why anyone should have to wait for indeterminate amounts of time for TV shows/films that have been made already to air or come out on soon to be defunct dvd.
Pay £25 (£50) for a BluRay? No way!
If they want to put tv shows on websites so we can download them, ads and all that seems like the perfect compromise. If they are too greedy/lazy to do that… thank you Bit Torrent!
Gee, I thought music would rate a lot higher. Filesharing has changed so much since the days of Napster.
the thing with p0rn is that its way to vast to be sucessful on torrents. Seed and leechers alike are spread out to countless files, making it harder to download. The swarm aint efficient enough.
Rapidhare is a pornographic godldmine…when you know how to search
it would be a lot better if the pie chart used contrasting colors…. to make it well noticeable…
Torrentfreak’s own post says that 60 percent of video downloads are “adult oriented”
“It’s hardly surprising that almost 60 percent of all illegally downloaded video files were “adult-oriented”. TV shows were the second most popular at 20 percent, and only 5 percent were “mainstream movie content”. With regards to legal video downloads, sixty-two percent were TV shows, 24 percent were music videos and 6 percent were movies.”
Books, Anime, and Software… Should I be surprised at where they stand at now?
maybe we can learn something from this. when i say we i mean the the big three, or phone if you include fox. give the public a chance to view shows at when and where they want. fine give them commercials if you must, but give them a chance to catch up on there stories if they happen to miss them. hell i missed lost on V-day and i need to see it soon. so what do i do….
porn trumps all when it comes to consuming bandwidth.
tv shows are big on torrents because there is no better (or few) alternatives.
porn does. you can get direct downloads from porn sites. add to that torrents,other p2p,bin newsgroup,rapidshare,etc
porn is the best fuckin business in the world. low cost, huge demand and sex !!!!!
OMG the porn lobby is out in force.
Do not,– I repeat DO NOT make eye contact. They will pop wood.
Actually, the Usenet newsgroups are the best place to get porn. Dozens of different newsgroups devoted to every taste and fetish you can imagine with hundreds of pics and dozens of movies posted every day.
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