The return of Breaking Bad has naturally generated lots of buzz online. In the meanwhile, viewers in the United Kingdom were able to get the latest episode from Netflix and iTunes within hours of its airing in the United States. Nevertheless, a lot of viewers preferred to download the Blood Money episode from torrents instead.

Industry observers claim that some 80,000 people were sharing the latest episode within hours of it appearing on the Internet. Indeed, the statistics revealed that torrented downloads had topped 500,000 within 12 hours. Such figures only cover downloads, while there are many viewers who watched the series on unlicensed streaming services. Those are known to have become an increasingly high-profile headache for broadcasters recently.

The tech blog TorrentFreak calculated that one day after the episode aired online, Australian fans accounted for over 16% of its BitTorrent downloads, followed by the US (less than 16%), Canada (less than 10%) and the UK (8.5%).

It proves that the Australians are turning to piracy in greater numbers, and reason is clear – people are frustrated at the long delays between popular TV shows airing in the United States and being broadcast in Australia.

For example, in the UK, there is evidence of a move by the AMC network to drastically shorten this sort of geographical “window”, with Breaking Bad available to stream on Netflix and purchase on Apple’s iTunes Store within mere hours of the American premiere.

According to AMC, almost 6 million Americans watched the final season premiere on the 11th of August, while ratings company Nielsen tracked over 760,000 tweets from 400,000 users during the broadcast. So, shortening those geographic windows is one key tactic for the TV industry to curb the piracy fuelled by fans’ determination to join in the buzz around popular shows shortly after they air in the United States.

Earlier in August, TWC CEO Alan Bewkes made headlines saying that piracy of Game of Thrones, produced by his company’s HBO subsidiary, was a phenomenon of “a tremendous word of mouth thing”. He admitted that they have been dealing with this for a few decades and realized that it just leads to more paying subs. Bewkes even said that the Game of Thrones being the most pirated show worldwide is better than an Emmy.