TorrentFreak

As Game of Thrones smashes download records this week, an extra act of sharing will soon come from a most unusual source. Sick and tired of the poor quality offered by HBO’s official streaming service, the director of movie Iron Sky says he’s going to take retaliatory action. Complaining about their delivery the Finnish director told HBO that their service “sucks” so in future he’ll download the show from The Pirate Bay.

They’re some of the most popular torrents around, but how do they get on the Internet and who puts them there? Today TorrentFreak catches up with the founder of a TV show release group responsible for releasing hundreds of TV shows online. Jaded by the super-organized and hard to reach ‘Scene’ he’s now back on home P2P territory, encouraging everyone to share while reminding people to support the creators of this great entertainment format.

The first ever certified BitTorrent Android box goes on sale today, allowing users to stream files downloaded with uTorrent wirelessly to their television. The new set-top box supports playback of all popular video formats and can also download torrents by itself, fully anonymously if needed.

With 2012 nearing its end we begin our annual look at the most-pirated entertainment titles across various categories, starting today with TV-shows. Game of Thrones comes out on top this year, followed by last year’s number one Dexter. Episodes of both shows are shared among millions of people, with airing delays and limited legal download options among the key reasons to pirate.

Interesting news coming out of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) shows that maybe BitTorrent pirates have a point when it comes to not waiting for TV shows. In an attempt to dissuade Aussie punters from torrenting the show, ABC has announced it will offer this weekend’s new Doctor Who episode on its iview service as soon as it finishes airing in the UK.

With over 3 million downloads per episode, the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is without doubt the most pirated TV-show of the season. Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that most of the pirates come from Australia, while London tops the list of pirate cities. But why have these people turned to BitTorrent?

Some Internet piracy groups decided to implement some new regulations and standards last week. Instead of releasing TV shows in the Xvid/avi format, groups responsible for putting major TV shows online switched to MP4/x264. Outraged by the lack of democracy, some BitTorrent users are directing their anger at bewildered torrent sites and even threatening to boycott releases. For those who understand, the whole thing is pretty amusing.