However, when someone in Hollywood does break ranks, it’s always worth listening to what they have to say.

Just recently movie director Lexi Alexander has been shaking things up with comments not only supporting jailed Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde, but also those that blame studio bosses for leaks of movies such as The Expendables 3.

Today Alexander has delivered perhaps her most controversial revelation yet, news which suggests that direct leverage of piracy helped a major network get its own streaming services off the ground with much reduced costs.

The report comes from a contact of Alexander’s working in the industry. She’s keeping his identity a secret so as not to jeopardize his career, but his revelations are quite an eye opener.

“Many years ago, I was employed at one of the Major Networks in an R&D capacity. What our team was tasked with was figuring out how to build streaming networks. Building a parallel to the broadcast networks where a program could be digitized and then never go back to the analog world again,” he told Alexander.

“[W]hen you’re working at the level of a network, there’s too much to be done by hand, and you have to design systems. For digitizing. Transcoding. Asset management. Dealing with different audio mixes. Subtitles. Error correction. Multi-bit rate streaming for a wide variety of clients. Evolving formats and containers.”

Clearly the job of transitioning to the digital domain presented significant challenges that needed to be overcome. However, R&D workers needed experience to solve these problems and according to the insider that was obtained in a most unorthodox fashion.

“We were all pirates. I’m not saying we leaked material to the internet – nobody was that crazy. But everyone illegally downloaded media. We traded tips on our setups, best practices, the most efficient tools and workflows. Everyone was downloading illegally. The VPs. The head of content security. EVERYONE.”

Of course, any major expenditure such as creating new networks would have to be passed off by the powers that be, something that could take years. But while those holding the purse-strings were deep in thought, time wasn’t being wasted down in R&D. In the pirate world, experiments were taking place.

“We honed our skills, our design ideas, our workflow concepts in illegal waters. So when we finally got the greenlight to build something, we knew what we were doing. We were fluent,” the insider said.

This unofficial training led to huge savings for the network, slashing R&D costs while bringing products more quickly to market. Alexander’s contact notes that these savings as a result of piracy are a far cry from the losses Hollywood prefers to talk about.

“So when I look at all the complaints about piracy costing corporations billions of dollars, all I can think about is the billions of free R&D the corporations have received from the pirate economy. Of all the money and resources we were not given by our bosses, which led us to solve problems with the tools that were available to us,” he concludes.

Finally, it appears that Lexi Alexander isn’t done yet. She’s now inviting others to come forward with their own anonymous “anti-piracy hypocrisy stories”. Better get the popcorn, this could get interesting.

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

Every week the search engine receives millions of DMCA takedown notices requiring it to take case-by-case action, but the company’s reluctance to do something more permanent has made it search-engine-enemy-#1 with copyright holders who never miss an opportunity to lay on the criticism.

In the background, however, Microsoft’s Bing flies comparatively under the radar. Sure it processes plenty of takedown notices too, but it receives little of the corporate pressure piled onto Google. This can only be a result of Google’s place in the market, since Mr Don’t Be Evil has done more than its rival to combat piracy.

Case in point, Bing’s powerful and somewhat under-used streaming video search engine which offers to find TV shows from the get-go.

While Google gets heavily criticized for its AutoComplete feature (which is already partially censored following copyright holder requests), Bing has no problem in first offering TV shows and then completing suggestions of what to watch. Tap in “BRE” and at the top of the list appears BREAKING BAD. We clicked the option – Bing delivered.

The first few results are shown below but those are just the tip of the iceberg and more specific show searches hardly ever come up short either. The auto-suggestions at the top of the screen are there in case ideas run out too, helpfully pushing the user towards varies series and specific episodes.

As can be seen from the image above, those who are fussy over the quality of the content being presented can filter by resolution too, right up to 1080p. Also, restricting searches to videos over 20 mins rejects many trailers and other samplers in favor of episodes and full length movies.

Aside from being a pretty good search engine (it came up with some long-forgotten TV show pilots from the 1970s), Bing also has a rather nice trick up its sleeve. Hover a mouse over any video thumbnail shown in the results and its size will instantly increase to display a proper video preview of the content in question. As far as we’re aware, no other search engine online today does that.

Of course, someone at Bing isn’t deliberately programming its engine to present infringing results, those are determined by intelligence gleaned from user search requests. That being said, if Google debuted a new “TV Show” search engine tomorrow and began auto-completing and auto-suggesting infringing TV content, weeks-long industry hysteria would ensue.

It’s also worth pointing out that Google also has a decent video search which is almost certainly used by many, many more millions than Bing’s. It’s nowhere near as glossy and definitely not as ‘risky’ in how it presents content, but that won’t stop the search company from continuing to take most of the rightsholder flak due to its colossal userbase and its uncontested position in the market.

Make no mistake, Google will remain in the firing line for the foreseeable future, even while other companies get away with much, much more. But their time will come, it’s almost inevitable, an event that could be triggered by Google caving in to increasing rightsholder demands.

Image credit

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

This is one of the reasons why Hulu and Netflix drastically decreased TV-show piracy in the U.S. Viewers are happy with these legal streaming options, but not all studios see that as a success.

Starting last Monday, ABC began delaying the availability of new episodes on Watch ABC and Hulu. Viewers without a cable subscription or Hulu Plus account now have to wait a full week before they can catch up with their favorite show online.

With this move ABC hopes to generate extra revenue, However, at the same time they are boosting piracy of their shows, and not just by a few percent.

Research by Tru Optik shows that the number of BitTorrent downloads for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s winter premiere skyrocketed. The show saw a near 600% spike in United States downloads compared to previous episodes.

The increase can in part be explained by the streaming delay, as there was no significant increase in regular TV ratings or talk about the show on social media.

Other ABC shows were affected by the change as well according to Tru Optik’s data. In fact, all ABC shows saw an increase of at least 50% or more in BitTorrent downloads compared to their last original episode.

TorrentFreak talked to Tru Optik’s Executive Vice President Chris Medina, who expects that the piracy numbers of ABC shows will be up by millions, compared to previous years.

“Every decision a network makes has an impact on the demand and consumption of their content. The data makes it clear that tens of millions more illegal downloads of ABC shows will occur in 2014 as a result of this policy change,” Medina says.

There is no doubt that streaming delays are not in the best interests of TV-viewers. Although it might be a good business decision in the short-term, one has to doubt whether driving people to ‘pirated’ content is a wise choice. To many viewers it is clearly a step backward.

Instead of artificial restrictions the public demands flexibility when it comes to entertainment, and right now video streaming sites and BitTorrent do a better job at this than ABC. This sentiment is also reflected in the comments on Hulu.

“Internet savvy people who want to watch the episode will find a way to do so. They are out there in multiples. This is foolish on ABC’s part because they lose out on advertising eyeballs. By the time the episode shows up, many people will have already watched it by ‘other means’,” one commenter on Hulu notes.

This is not the first time a streaming delay had led to a surge in piracy. In 2011 Fox took a similar decision, which also turned many people towards pirate channels.

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

China and piracy are topics that often run hand-in-hand and as a result the country is subjected to endless criticism from the world’s largest entertainment companies. Figures of up to 99% piracy on certain products are thrown around like confetti making tackling the Chinese infringement issue a seemingly impossible task. However, it doesn’t have to be that way and things are beginning to change.

At the turn of 2014 and following an investigation into the streaming of unlicensed content, the National Copyright Administration of China labeled the QVOD video platform and Baidu, China’s largest search engine, as 2013′s top copyright infringers. In a parallel lawsuit filed with the help of the MPA, both services were fined $41,000 for copyright infringement, the maximum currently permissible.

Then something interesting happened. Just days later Sohu Video, a local platform with 389 million users, announced it had secured licenses to show NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Other deals to show The Walking Dead and Modern Family to a massive Chinese audience are also in the bag.

And now the BBC is getting in the on act too. Inspired by a Chinese obsession with Sherlock, its hit show based on the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the UK national broadcaster is fast-tracking it straight to China and airing it just two hours after it debuts in the UK.

The first episode has already been watched millions of times and every single one of those Chinese viewings subtracts from those who would otherwise have chosen to obtain the show from unlicensed sources.

This move by the BBC might only chip away slightly at the huge piracy rate in China but it’s a great start and one that shows real potential, as recognized by Sohu.com, the video site that recently licensed Saturday Night Live.

“The more content we buy, the less piracy we get,” chief executive Charles Zhang said.

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

With 5.9 million downloads via BitTorrent, the 2013 season finale has beat the competition by a landslide.

More than half of the downloads occurred in the first week after the show aired and the total exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the US. Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead complete the top three with and estimated 4.2 and 3.6 million downloads respectively.

Game of Thrones’ win comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records already this year, with over 170,000 people sharing a copy of an episode simultaneously.

There are a wide variety of reasons why people download TV-shows, but to a certain degree one could claim that HBO is to blame for the massive piracy of Game of Thrones. The network prefers to keep access to the show “exclusive” and even Netflix wasn’t able to buy the rights no matter what they offered.

Interestingly enough, we also learned this year that the huge number of unauthorized downloads don’t bother the show’s makers all that much, quite the contrary. Game of Thrones director David Petrarca previously admitted that piracy generated much-needed “cultural buzz” around his show.

Jeff Bewkes, CEO of HBO’s parent company Time Warner, went even further, stating that piracy resulted in more subscriptions for his company and that receiving the title of “most-pirated” was “better than an Emmy.”

On the other end of the spectrum we have Gale Anne Hurd, executive producer of The Walking Dead, who told Variety last week that unauthorized downloads are not necessarily the blessing others claim they are.

“There’s a mistaken belief by many of my peers that piracy is somehow good, that viewers will develop a habit to pay for it. I’m not sure they really understand other than anecdotal evidence that their ratings go up that the people who pirate are not then going to choose legal downloads or legal viewing in the future,” Hurd said.

Hurd has a point, as it’s not always that easy for existing pirates to give up their habit, not even if the legal options are widely available and free. For example, The Walking Dead premiere this year was downloaded en masse in the US, despite the fact that AMC streamed the show for free.

This debate about whether TV-show piracy is a good or bad thing will most likely continue throughout the coming year, and beyond.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide ( per single episode) for 2013, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data are estimated by TorrentFreak based on several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

It is worth nothing that online streaming and cyberlocker downloads are not included since there are no public sources to draw data from. The total piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

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

In some cases people had to wait up to a year to view their favorite show after the U.S. release, which is unacceptable for most die-hard fans.

Responding to this criticism the TV industry has systematically improved traditional release windows. The recent premiere of The Walking Dead’s fourth season is a prime example of how the industry is adapting to the signals pirates have been sending for years.

To remove one of the incentives for people to grab an unauthorized copy of the show, Fox International Channels premiered the show in 125 countries a day after it first aired on US television.

“We want to prevent the spoilers for sure, we also want to make sure [international viewers] get the best version of the show — not some pirated version,” Liz Dolan, Fox International Channel’s chief marketing officer told The Wrap.

Unfortunately for Fox, however, pirated versions are available in better quality than most legal streaming options. Also, the download numbers have not declined, quite the opposite.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that 16 hours after the first episode appeared online more than half a million people had grabbed a copy through one of many torrent sites. This is more than last year’s season premiere, despite the legal viewing options.

Interestingly, most downloaders come from the U.S. where there is no release lag at all.

Based on a sample of more than 30,000 people who shared the show via a BitTorrent client, we see that the United States is in the lead with 15.5 percent of the total. This means that even though people can stream the episode for free, many still preferred to download it through a torrent site.

In the U.K and Australia there was a slight delay but even legal availability couldn’t prevent people from pirating the season opening. With 11.7 and 10.1 percent these countries are second and third respectively. The Philippines and Canada complete the top five with 8.8 and 6.8 percent of the total.

Fox has to be applauded for making the show available quickly in so many territories, something that was unthinkable half a decade ago. It’s safe to say that the download numbers would have been much higher without these efforts, although at the moment piracy is far from defeated.

In part this might be because some prefer the unauthorized download option simply out of habit. This is especially true for U.S. file-sharers. As we reported earlier this year, many people who pay for a Netflix subscription downloaded Netflix’s exclusive Arrested Development release, preferring the download experience over online streaming.

There is also another group, one that simply doesn’t want to pay for a subscription, which is required in Australia for example. It’s also possible that they are just unhappy with the viewing options currently on offer. In many countries viewers still have to tune in at a fixed time slot while many prefer to program their own viewing schedule.

The challenge for the entertainment industry is to take away these leftover incentives, and make sure that the legal options become the default. For some people it may be too late to be converted, but for most there’s still hope.

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

Later this month the third season of Homeland will premiere, and this time the number of downloads may even be higher as pirates have access to the premiere four weeks in advance.

Homeland’s season premiere turned up online a few hours ago and already 100,000 people have grabbed an advance copy via one of the Internet’s many torrent sites. While other TV-shows have come out ahead of schedule in the past, the source of this Homeland leak is rather unique, as the copy is not completely finished.

The leak is a so-called workprint, an unfinished copy that lacks some final touches. In two instances some visual effects of bomb craters are still to be added and the opening credits are also missing. In addition, there’s one scene where the voice of the actor is dubbed.

Since it is a workprint, the source of the leak is likely connected to a post-production studio. Unlike promotional screeners which are sent out to the press in advance, not many people have access to unfinished production work.

Somehow a copy leaked outside official channels, which are generally well protected, and eventually made its way to the scene.

Unlike regular scene releases, however, it was shared by an unknown group called “HOMELAND,” which is unusual as scene groups often take pride in their work. Whoever leaked it didn’t live up to scene standards though as the release was quickly “NUKED” by peers on a technicality.

Showtime hasn’t officially responded to the leak thus far, but it could be that they’re not too bothered by the free publicity. In recent months several TV insiders have gone on the record stating that piracy may actually help TV-shows, because of word-of-mouth promotion it generates.

And with such a unique leak, there is bound to be plenty of attention during the days to come.

The last time a high-profile workprint leaked was in 2009 when an unfinished copy of the movie Wolverine leaked a month early. The leak made headlines all over the world and 20th Century Fox quickly involved the FBI to find the leaker.

After eight months the FBI eventually arrested New York resident Gilberto Sanchez. Although he was most likely not the original source of the leak, in 2011 the then 48-year old Sanchez pleaded guilty to uploading a copy of the movie to Megaupload. He was later sentenced to one year in jail.

Whether a 20th Century Fox-like manhunt or a more relaxed HBO attitude will be adopted should become apparent in the near future. In any case, the FBI will be watching.

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

For years the above argument has been used in response to ever-increasing piracy rates. However, the start of Breaking Bad’s second half of the fifth and final season shows that mere availability is not always good enough.

Just a few hours after the first unauthorized copy of Breaking Bad appeared online, 80,000 people were sharing the episode simultaneously through the most popular torrent file. After 12 hours, half a million people had already grabbed a copy via BitTorrent, and this number is increasing rapidly.

From the looks of it, Breaking Bad is well on its way to beat the record of 2,580,000 downloads it set last year.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak throughout the day reveals that most early downloaders, a massive 16.1%, come from Australia. Down Under the show aired on the pay TV network Foxtel, but it appears that many Aussies prefer to download a copy instead.

The same is true for the United States and Canada, with 16% and 9.6% of the total downloads respectively, despite the legal offerings.

In the UK, Netflix subscribers could stream the latest episode a few hours after the U.S. premiere. However, tens of thousands preferred to download a copy via BitTorrent, good for 8.5% of all downloads.

The Netherlands, where Breaking Bad actually premiered on public television several hours before the U.S. release, takes fifth place in the country rankings, followed by Poland, Spain, Brazil, India and Sweden.

Breaking Bad’s latest download figures make the show one of the most pirated in 2013 thus far. Nevertheless, it doesn’t come close to the record set by Game of Thrones, which became the most pirated TV-show of the spring season with 5.2 million downloads.

While one might think that the people connected to Game of Thrones are outraged by this mass piracy, the opposite appears to be true according to several insiders.

Game of Thrones director David Petrarca previously said he believes that the buzz created by pirates eventually leads to more paying subscribers, and last week Time Warner CEO Jess Bewkes said that it’s better than winning an Emmy.

“Our experience is that it leads to more paying subscribers. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world. That’s better than an Emmy,” Bewkes said.

In other words, Breaking Bad fans have to step up if they want the show to capture the most prestigious TV award of the year. An almost impossible task, but with seven episodes to go the race is still open.

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

If fans can’t get a show through legal channels they often turn to pirated alternatives.

So when Time Warner Cable dropped CBS last Friday after the companies failed to reach a broadcasting agreement, there was a good chance that many of the blacked-out subscribers would turn to file-sharing networks to get their fix.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that this is indeed the case for the popular show “Under The Dome.”

To find out whether download rates in the affected markets increased, we monitored U.S. BitTorrent downloads of last week’s episode as well as the one that aired this Monday following the blackout.

The data from these two samples show that in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh, relatively more people downloaded the latest episode, an indication that customers are turning to unauthorized channels to get the show.

With hundreds of thousands of downloads Under The Dome is one of the most pirated TV-shows at the moment. Of all sampled downloaders in the U.S. 10.9% came from the blackout regions for last week’s episode, and this increased to 14.6% for Monday’s episode, a 34% increase.

In New York City, one of the largest affected markets, the relative piracy rate more than doubled from 1.3% of all U.S. downloads last week to 3% for the episode that aired after the blackout.

Worldwide, the latest Under The Dome episode was downloaded slightly more than previous episodes. This means that the relative increase in piracy rates also resulted in more downloads. More tracking is required to show a long-term effect, and whether the results are the same for other CBS shows.

While one should always be careful of drawing strong conclusions from city-based data, especially when we don’t know how many downloaders are Time Warner Cable subscribers, these initial results do suggest that the blackout resulted in a local piracy surge.

At the same time that piracy spiked, the official ratings took a large hit. On Monday, Under The Dome reached its season low ranking with only 10.49 million viewers compared to 11.41 million the week before.

Meanwhile, Time Warner and CBS are still unable to reach an agreement. Yesterday Time Warner’s Chief Executive Glenn Britt offered to include CBS as an “a la carte” option for its subscribers but CBS dismissed the proposal as “a sham.”

As long as this standoff continues it’s expected that more and more TV fans will turn to unauthorized channels to watch their favorite shows, with the risk that some may never come back.

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

The achievement comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records in a few weeks, and the high number of unauthorized downloads has been widely covered in the press.

Even before the third season started there was already a lot of talk about Game of Thrones piracy. Interestingly, many of the people connected to the show saw it as a compliment rather than a major threat that needs to be dealt with.

The most outspoken position was taken by David Petrarca, the show’s director, who noted that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. According to the director, pirates are partly responsible for the “cultural buzz” the show needs to thrive and survive.

After the season got underway some critical notes also appeared. The Ambassador of the United States of America to Australia recently complained about the “plain theft” being carried out by Australians.

This was countered by many self-confessed pirates including Timo Vuorensola, director of the Disney movie Iron Sky. The Finnish director told HBO that their legal service “sucks” and promised to download the show from The Pirate Bay instead.

The end result is that the most shared episode of Game of Thrones, the season opening, was downloaded by 5.2 million people all over the world. This dazzling statistic represents a 25 percent increase compared to last year and three times the amount achieved by several of the TV shows further down the top 10.

The increase in viewers wasn’t limited to the pirated channels though. HBO also saw ratings for Game of Thrones increase by roughly a quarter, driving many new customers to their paid subscriptions.

Whether the number of legal viewers would be higher or lower without piracy is hard to measure, but it could go both ways.

Looking at the full list we see that it contains many household names that have done well over the years, such as The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, which are listed in second and third place respectively.

There are also some notable newcomers. In fact, three shows in the list of most pirated shows just completed their first season – Hannibal, Vikings and Arrow. All three achieved between one and two million downloads per episode.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide (estimates per single episode) for the spring season from March up until June 2013, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

It is worth nothing that online streaming and cyberlocker downloads are not included since these can’t be measured accurately. The full piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

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