An analysis of what people are downloading using the file-sharing Bittorrent system offers an insight into how the way people are watching TV is changing.
A site called SumoTorrent gathered the information from more than 400.000 .torrent files on the net.
It found that most people use Bittorrent to download the latest episode of their favourite TV show. Nearly 50% of people using Bittorrent go online to download a TV show, even though only 10% of the available torrents are related to television. Music accounts for the largest number of torrents, at 25%.
In same ways, the figures are hardly surprising. Some TV shows like Lost is downloaded more than 500,000 times every week.
It is easy to understand why this happens. The shows are ‘free’, the advertising has been stripped out and it means you can watch any show at any time, regardless of what country you are in. It also reflects the trend away from watching TV at specific times and instead having it fit around your schedule.
TV producers are exploring more ways to use the internet to distribute their shows, with Apple’s iTunes store leading the way. It is hard to compete with free but making shows more widely available is a step in the right direction.
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