In the US streaming sites such as Hulu offer ‘legal’ platforms to watch TV-shows online. However, in the rest of the world people have to wait for weeks or months until they can watch US TV-shows.
Most TV-show downloads come from overseas where the episodes haven’t aired yet, let alone that it can be streamed online. The only option left for these unfortunate souls is to use BitTorrent, or wait.
However, it seems that people don’t want to wait for months when they know that their favorite TV-show is out there, just a few clicks away. Indeed, at an increasing rate people have started to use BitTorrent to get their TV fix.
Traffic to the leading TV-torrent distribution site EZTV is up over 50% compared to last year. The site had more than 15 million visits in September compared to 9.2 a year earlier.
TV-torrents are particularly popular in Australia where most US TV-shows air with a delay of months or even years. EZTV is among the 300 most visited websites Down Under, and Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt are all in the top 100.
Stopping TV piracy is not that hard though. TV distribution companies should get rid of the long delays and offer streams to people outside of the US. If they can pull that off there is no doubt that the number of ‘pirated’ downloads will plunge.
Below is the list of most downloaded TV-shows on BitTorrent last week. Heroes is leading the chart with well over a million downloads in just one week.
The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.
Most Downloads (recent episodes)
| ranking | show |
|---|---|
| torrentfreak.com | |
| 1 | Heroes |
| 2 | House M.D. |
| 3 | The Big Bang Theory |
| 4 | Entourage |
| 5 | How I Met Your Mother |
| 6 | Family Guy |
| 7 | Desperate Housewives |
| 8 | Dexter |
| 9 | Supernatural |
| 10 | Grey’s Anatomy |
