TorrentFreak

Over the past two days more than 175,000 people have pirated episodes of the revived cult series Arrested Development. While the numbers don’t come close to those of hit series Game of Thrones, it’s remarkable to see how many of the downloaders come from regions where the entire season is available on Netflix. Are these people really too cheap to buy a Netflix subscription or are they downloading via BitTorrent out of habit?

Video streaming giant Netflix believes that making content available is the best way to beat online piracy, and the company has data to back this up. Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos reveals that ISPs are noticing a drop in BitTorrent traffic every time they launch in a new territory. “The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options,” Sarandos says.

This week Netflix launched its popular on demand video streaming service in Finland, but not without controversy. To cater to the local audience, on some of its programming the company displayed “unauthorized” fansubs. Unlike regular subtitles, fansubs are created without permission from content owners and often used alongside pirated content. Netflix apologized for the use of the unauthorized subtitles and has promised to take them offline.

During the last year Netflix managed to outgrow BitTorrent in terms of the amount of US Internet traffic it generates. A promising finding for Hollywood as it shows that there’s an overwhelming interest for the legal movie streaming service. At TorrentFreak we wondered what might happen if all US BitTorrent users made the switch to Netflix, and the results of this exploration are quite intriguing.

New data published by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that on the average day Netflix and BitTorrent are responsible for 40 percent of all Internet traffic in North America. During peak hours Netflix accounts for a third of all download traffic, while BitTorrent is credited for nearly half of all upload traffic during the busiest time of the day.

Netflix recently published a list of the ten most rented movies of all time. This got us thinking; what are the most downloaded movies on BitTorrent? Today we present the full chart of the top ten most pirated movies transferred via the now ubiquitous protocol, a list headed by Avatar.

Something’s not right in the United States. Increasingly people start to pay for Netflix subscriptions so they can stream movies on demand. In the States Netflix nearly doubled the number of new subscribers in the first quarter of 2010, from 1.7 to 3.3 million. In total, Netflix now has 22.8 million paid subscribers in the [...]