What is popular to pirates?
Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ:
TorrentFreak looks at the ten most popular pirated TV shows:
Nearly 50% of all the people who use BitTorrent at any given point
in time do so to download a TV show, with popular series such as “Lost”
getting close to 10 million downloads per episode. These figures are
getting awfully close to the viewer count on TV as reported by Nielsen, and they are still rising.
People are getting used to on-demand content. They simply want to
watch their favorite shows whenever they want, wherever they want. To
give some more insight into this growing phenomenon, and because
Nielsen is not counting BitTorrent downloads, we decided to start a
weekly report of the most downloaded TV shows on BitTorrent.
The data is collected by TorrentFreak
from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites. The timing is a bit
unfortunate, since popular shows like Desperate Housewives, House and
Greys Anatomy just had their season finale last week, but we are aiming
to publish an updated list every week from now on.
Top Downloads May 25 - June 01
Ranking
TV-show
1
(1)
Lost
2
(5)
Battlestar Galactica
3
(new)
The Daily Show
4
(new)
The Colbert Report
5
(new)
So You Think You Can Dance
6
(new)
Top Chef
7
(new)
The Tudors
8
(new)
Men in Trees
9
(new)
The Ultimate Fighter
10
(new)
Greek
To give an impression of how many downloads these shows can get, here is the list of the most downloaded TV episodes in 2007.
The number of downloads reported here is for Mininova only, so these
could easily quadruple if all large BitTorrent sites were taken into
account.
Top Downloads 2007
Ranking
TV-Shows (downloads most popular episode)
1
Heroes (2.439.154)
2
Top Gear (1.217.923)
3
Battlestar Galactica (706.209)
4
Lost (705.724)
5
Prison Break (608.487)
6
Desperate Housewives (457.805)
7
24 (524.303)
8
Family Guy (522.839)
9
Dexter (435.670)
10
Scrubs (427.420)
The increasing popularity of these series on…