James Delahunty
18 Feb 2005 7:08
As Television stations and production companies are quickly realising what they call a new problem with TV piracy, the analysts are rushing to give the world some details on the amount of TV shows that are being pirated around the world on the Internet. According to research, UK internet users illegally download the most TV shows from the net. In some cases with American series, British TV viewers have to wait from weeks to months to see the latest episodes of a certain series.
About 18% of the total downloader’s tracked are from the UK according to Envisional. They also claim that TV show downloading increased by 150% in the last year. About 70% of those downloads were from BitTorrent sites. "It's now as easy to download a pirate TV show as it is to programme a VCR," said Ben Coppin from Envisional. A typical episode of 24 was downloaded by about 100,000 people globally, said the report, and an estimated 20,000 of those were from within the UK.
Personal Video Recorders (PVR) like TiVo boxes and Sky+ are being blamed for helping to set this "new" trend of sharing. One of the most worrying things to TV stations is that the downloads usually come with the advertisements completely cut out. Because of the length difference between full length movies and episodes of tv shows, they can appear online much quicker. The most popular would be HDTV (High Definition TV) downloads which offer very high quality.
Source:
BBC