According to the report, Swedish youngsters watch over an hour of downloaded TV-shows every week. Prison Break is the most popular series. 35% of the people who saw Prison Break in the past month indicated that they did not see it on TV but downloaded the episodes via a P2P network.

TV-ratings for the Swedish youngsters have been very stable during the last seven years while other groups have increased their viewing dramaticaly during the last years. This shows that TV-broadcasters are missing out on potential revenue. The figures are probably not limited to Sweden, popular TV-shows are downloaded by hundred thousands of people worldwide every week.

“The Swedish youth will probably continue to download pirated TV-shows unless attractive alternatives are offered to them”, says Sorosh Tavakoli the project leader.

The report also looked into the reasons behind this massive piracy and found that there several reasons why people download TV-shows. Most importantly, people want the freedom to watch a TV-show whenever they want, and wherever they want. Another reason is that they don’t want to wait until their favorite series air on Swedish TV. It is hard for most people to wait that long, especially once they know that they can get it off BitTorrent only a few hours after the show is broadcasted in the US.

High quality on-demand TV is the future, it’s time that TV-producers realize that and take action. It will benefit both the public and the producers on the long run.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It seems that approximately 25% of the content in the store has such tight restrictions, that it wont play on computers with a graphics driver older than 20 months. A simple update in Windows wont help either, so BitTorrent suggests to download a third party application called modtool, to fix this issue. Eh..?

Bram Cohen already said to TorrentFreak that “the DRM issue is causing an awful lot of headaches”, but I guess that’s just an understatement.

To make it even worse, the movies and TV-shows on the BitTorrent.com be protected with some extra DRM in the near future. Earlier this week Macrovision announced that their analog copy protection, will be used on BitTorrent.com, as well as other video services like Netflix and Movielink. Brilliant!

This is exactly why most people wont stop pirating movies and TV-shows. DRM protected products can’t compete with the “illegal” counterparts. Why would one bother going through all the DRM hassle, if he or she can find superior (no DRM) content for free?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.