The International Olympic Committee (IOC) saw The Pirate Bay as one of the major threats and sent a letter to Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask.

The IOC requested “assistance” in getting rid of the Olympic torrents that were posted on the site, but Minister Ask couldn’t do much.

The Olympic videos remained online and The Pirate Bay poked the IOC in the eye by renaming their website to The Beijing Bay.

Fast forward to 2012 and the Beijing torrents are still online. Soon these will be joined by torrents of London’s Opening Ceremony, which will also be downloaded by millions of people. Some will download it because they couldn’t watch a live broadcast and others will just want a copy of the historic event for the archives.

However, BitTorrent is just a small part of the piracy challenges that NBC and the IOC face. Video streaming sites are perhaps a much bigger threat. In the coming weeks tens of thousands of unauthorized clips will appear on YouTube, and live streaming sites such as Justin.tv will be flooded with pirated streams.

Since NBC has paid more than a billion dollars for the Olympic broadcast rights, they will do whatever is in their power to stop these unauthorized streams. Luckily, YouTube and Justin.tv are helping out by automatically detecting pirated content, but there are hundreds of other streaming sources that are much harder to police.

Sites such as Rojadirecta.me and Wiziwig.tv, for example, will soon be flooded with dozens of external links through which the Olympic events can be streamed online.

But perhaps the U.S. Government is willing to help out?

Considering the money that’s involved it would come as no surprise if several of these streaming(-link) sites have their domains seized by the U.S. authorities in the days to come. We’ve seen this happening during the Super Bowl this year as well as the year before, and the Olympics appear to be a good opportunity to revive Operation in Our Sites.

Interestingly enough, free and legal online streams are available in pretty much all parts of the world except the United States. YouTube, for example, is streaming all events in 64 countries across Asia and Africa including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Angola, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia and Zambia.

In the UK the BBC is offering a free online stream, and many other countries have their own alternatives.

The lack of free live streams in the U.S. is going to be one of the main reasons why people will pirate the 2012 Olympics. However, NBC also deserves some credit for taking a few steps forward. Just two years ago NBC said that they would only broadcast the highlights because people “are not dying to watch lots of long-form content on a 13-inch screen.” But this has changed.

While paid, all 2012 events will now be streamed online. In addition, people without a subscription will be able to buy a temporary pass which will provide access to a four-hour streaming block.

Whether this will be good enough to prevent people from accessing unauthorized streams will become clear in the days to come.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In 2008 Olympic torrents were hugely popular, especially the Opening Ceremony which was downloaded by nearly 5 million people. It is doubtful that this 2008 Olympic record will be broken this year, but nonetheless, there is plenty of interest on BitTorrent for the 2010 Opening Ceremony.

As with most big sporting events there are huge commercial interests involved in the Olympics. This is one of the main reasons why the International Olympic Committee and broadcasters such as NBC have announced a piracy crackdown, trying to prevent their content from leaking online.

“Our aim is to make access to pirated material inconvenient, low quality and hard to find,” said Rick Cotton, NBC’s Executive Vice President commenting on their Olympic mission. It is needless to say that this mission has already failed miserably.

The Opening Ceremony could be watched online through dozens of illegal streams last night, and a few hours later a high quality video of the entire broadcast appeared on file-sharing networks including BitTorrent. Thus far, nearly 100,000 people have downloaded the Opening Ceremony through BitTorrent.

A quick look at the locations of the downloaders reveals that roughly a quarter are Canadians. Another 15% of the downloaders come from the United States, followed by the UK with 5% and The Netherlands and Australia both with 4%.

In the coming days many of the sporting events will also surface online illegally, but the interest for the opening and closing ceremonies tend to be the highest, based on download numbers from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

It is expected that the International Olympic Committee will be outraged over this massive rights violation. In 2008 they urged Sweden to take action against the Pirate Bay over the Olympic torrents that they hosted, without result.

Maybe they should start offering their own sponsored downloads in 2012? There is plenty of demand for it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Other releases of the Olympics ceremony are popular as well, such as an iPod ready version of the first hour, a standard definition release of the opening ceremony, and a high definition capture of the torch lighting and fireworks. Three Olympic shows would have made it into our weekly TV-download chart, but we decided to count them as one.

The data of the TV-torrent chart is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

Top Downloads August 03 – August 10

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.