sl-LOST.com

In the first 20 hours after they appeared on BitTorrent, the final two episodes were downloaded a little over 900,000 times, an amount expected to increase to four or five million by the and of the week. As far as we know, this is a new download record for BitTorrent in such a short time frame.

[Via TorrentFreak]

Heroes…? Really?

[Via TorrentFreak.com]

LOST was illegaly downloaded 51 million times this year, according to research firm Big Champagne:

Most Popular TV Torrents

1. Heroes; 54,562,012
2. Lost; 51,151,396
3. 24; 34,119,093
4. Prison Break; 29,283,591
5. House; 26,277,954
6. Fringe; 21,434,755
7. Desperate Housewives; 21,378,412
8. Grey’s Anatomy; 19,916,775
9. Gossip Girl; 19,706,870
10. Smallville; 19,598,999

Visits to leading “torrent” sites, which index video and music files, have nearly doubled in the last year.

The proportion of file-sharing involving films and television rather than music is continuing to rise, the research shows.

[Via BBC News]

I just found out that the first half of tonight’s episode has been leaked to BitTorrent. You can download the video on this link. Can’t wait to watch the rest!

Big thanks to TorrentFreak’s Admin Ernesto for sending us the following info:

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows, together with the viewer average for TV in the US, based on data from Nielsen. Note that the download count for each show is per episode, the most downloaded in this case. The Olympics Opening Ceremony was one of the most wanted broadcasts of the year with 4,620,000 downloads, but we decided only to include TV-series.

The data for the top 10 is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. The download number is the sum of all torrent downloads for the most popular episode.

Source: TorrentFreak

Half of the people who use BitTorrent do so to download TV-shows. Some episodes of Lost get up to 10 million downloads. The team behind Torrent Freak had a chat with Jesse Alexander, the co-producer of the show, and asked him what his thoughts are on BitTorrent, piracy and the future of TV:

With torrents, no-one has to miss an episode anymore which keeps the fans more engaged. So called “pirates” advertise the shows to their friends, or write about it on their blogs. Accordingly, when we asked Jesse Alexander whether he thinks that BitTorrent might have helped to reach a broader audience, he answered with a clear cut “Yes”.

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