Unlike the regular episodes these last two were never aired by Fox on US television, this also shows in the download statistics. Up to 25 percent of the downloads came from the US compared to little over 5 percent for the other episodes that did air on television.

Episode 23 and 24 of the fourth Prison Break season are available on BitTorrent because some non-US networks did decide to air them. ‘Prison Break: The Final Break’, as the final two episodes are called, is scheduled for a (ca-ching) DVD release in the US on July 21.

The data for the most downloaded TV episodes of this week are listed below. The data are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

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

It’s interesting how BitTorrent Inc’s focus has shifted to include DRM and be restricted to only legal content. The initial goal of BitTorrent.com was to index all the various movies, music, TV shows and other files available over BitTorrent. Wired News reported in 2005 on the upcoming launch of the site that was going to be “an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download.”

We recently wrote about how BitTorrent.com was helping game developers distribute demos. In that article we profiled the strategy game Disciples II: Dark Prophecy. It was only a demo. But if you type “Disciples” into the search box on BitTorrent.com, you’ll find both the demo and a pirated version of the full game. Or try searching for “Prison Break” and see what you find. Each one of the 29 results you get is a copyrighted file. How exactly do these “filters” work?

How does BitTorrent.com get all this illegal content? It obviously doesn’t have an active uploading community like The Pirate Bay or Torrentspy. Instead, it indexes other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Meganova, Torrent Portal and TorrentReactor.

So, our question is, How is BitTorrent.com different from any other so-called illegal torrent site that indexes copyrighted content? Btmon.com does exactly the same thing! Sure, BitTorrent.com’s frontpage is full of game demos, legal music downloads and movie trailers, but one little search query away is just about every popular movie, TV show, music album and computer game.

In our minds, and according to US law, what BitTorrent.com is doing is not illegal. The DMCA clearly states that websites are only required to take down files if the copyright holder or a representative files a complaint. But why does the MPAA sue sites like Isohunt and Torrentspy (who also respect the DCMA), while they’re in bed with BitTorrent?

Dan Glickman (MPAA) and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)

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

The survey also showed that 16-25 year-olds consume 40 minutes of downloaded video every day, and that 16-20 year-olds consume an additional 20 minutes of web-based streaming video from services like YouTube daily.

The results for LOST, Prison Break, Entourage and Desperate Housewives, four of the most popular TV shows in Sweden, are summarized in the graph below.

We got the chance to talk to the project leader of this study, Sorosh Tavakoli. He said: “We have identified a group of ‘internet rebels’, they are primarily in the age of 20-25 that show some really advanced consumption patterns. They are the heaviest consumers of internet distributed motion pictures and they are proud about it. If the ‘system’ can’t provide it, they do it their own way.”

In total MMS asked 2500 respondents between the age of 16 and 65 about their TV viewing habits. According to MMS this sample was representative, which means that the results can be generalized to the entire Swedish population.

The present findings are in line with a poll conducted for the BBC earlier this month, which also showed that watching TV “online” is on the rise. MMS will release additional details about this study in early 2007

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

So I spent a week tracking the most popular TV torrents, and LOST came out on top.

For every popular TV-show I’ve summed up all the torrents with 100+ seeds one week after the release. Initially I also planned to count torrents with less seeds, but that didn’t add much to the total number of downloads. However, it does mean that the actual figures might be slightly higher (about 5%).

These stats are from public trackers only, so the actual number of downloads is actually a lot higher (nearing 1 million downloads). However counting public trackers only will give a good impression of what the most popular TV torrents are.

This is the top 3 of last weeks most popular TV torrents).

Eztv’s “Lost S03E04 HDTV XviD-XOR” torrent was by far the most popular, and was downloaded more than 270,000 times.

The higher quality release (hr.hdtv) is becoming more and more popular and was downloaded 60,000 times. Hr.hdtv releases have a higher resolution, most often around 960×540 which is half the size of the original HDTV broadcast. A 45 minute show is usually 700MB instead of 350MB like the other releases.

Other shows that are worth mentioning are: Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Desperate Housewives, South Park, Weeds, Jericho and Nip Tuck.

You could see this as the rest of the top 10. However, it is harder to make an accurate list as the total number of downloads decreases.

The popularity of online TV distribution has not been unnoticed. Apple’s iTunes store sold over 45 million TV shows in its first year, and more and more content distributors are currently exploring ways to sell their shows online. And I’m sure we will see a decline in illegal downloads as soon as they come up with a product that can compete with the “illegal” TV torrents.

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