The New Seasons of Breaking Bad Is a BitTorrent Hit!

As you may well be aware the return of Breaking Bad for its final season has caused a major stir on all social media sites. Viewers in the UK were able to stream the latest episode within a few hours of airing in the USA using Netflix and Itunes. This would suggest that the need to download the episode illegally would fall.
However after research was carried out and data gathered it was found that many users still downloaded the episode via torrents. It found that over 80,000 people were sharing the episode within a few hours of it airing and there had been over half a million downloads within the first 12 hours after the show aired.
What is even more astonishing is that this is only the amount of people who downloaded the episode. It does not take into account the thousands of people who streamed the episode using unlicensed websites.
The highest downloads of the episode came from Australia with 16.1% of the downloads, closely followed by the USA with 16% of the downloads. Following these was Canada with 9.6% and the UK with 8.5%.
This data shows the ever growing trend among Australians who have decided to illegally download shows as they are growing ever impatient of the time they have to wait for a program to air in Australia compared to when it originally aired in the US.
One thing which many broadcasters are working on is therefore shortening the time difference between airing in different countries. This can be one way in which to decrease the number of illegal downloads. This is why Netflix and Itunes have released the episode so quickly after airing for UK viewers.
Illegal downloads will continue to hinder the broadcasting companies and production teams for years to come. The best solution at the moment would be to keep inline airing times and make shows available to all in the quickest amount of time. This may not stop illegal downloads altogether but it will decrease the number a great deal.