Reports show that 50% of all people using BitTorrent at any given point in time do so to download TV-series, quite an impressive number. In total, over a billion TV-shows are downloaded every year, and this number continues to rise.

It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Some episodes of popular TV-shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over hundreds of sites. This number is getting awfully close to the average number of viewers on TV in the US. However, the major difference is that the BitTorrent “viewers” come from all over the world.

In January TorrentFreak published the list of “most downloaded TV-shows“, where we showed that the most popular episode of “Heroes” was downloaded 2.5 million times on Mininova alone. Even more impressive -across all BitTorrent sites- more than a billion episodes are downloaded every year worldwide.

The graph below shows the percentage of .torrent files per category downloaded on Mininova over the last 2 years - over 40 percent are TV-shows. To support this, we analyzed a sample of 400,000 torrents earlier this year. That data indicated that approximately half of all the people using BitTorrent at any given point in time, were using it to download a TV-show.

The popularity of TV-torrents hasn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, there are reports of TV-studios that allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing tool, by leaking unaired pilots intentionally. While the movie and music studios continue to fight their “war on piracy”, most of the TV-studios lay low. Read the rest of this entry »