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.

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

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.

Thanks to ShowInsider we now also include a list based on the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week.

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

Since both shows are ‘released’ on Tuesday, BitTorrent sites see a significant traffic increase on that day.

The data presented here is 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.

The Sarah Connor Chonicles, Pushing Daisies, Californication, Reaper, and Chuck are new TV shows that are about to start on their first season. The leak of The Sarah Connor Chonicles, highly anticipated by fans of The Terminator, stands out because this show is scheduled to launch in 2008. All the other leaks will air within the next few months.

For Weeds, it’s the second time that episodes have leaked before being aired on TV. Last year, exactly the same thing happened and thousands of people downloaded and watched the first episodes before they aired on TV. TV studios already offer a number of pilot episodes on the iTunes Store for free. Would it be too big a leap to assume they do the same on BitTorrent?

Here’s a list of the TV shows that leaked to BitTorrent this week, including the ‘offline’ air date:

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