UK Largest Pirate Online TV Downloader

The UK is officially the largest downloader of online pirate TV programmes, with the hit American series 24 being the most popular show, according to research released by internet monitoring company, Envisional.

The company found that increased bandwidth, technological advances and a growing demand for early access to popular American TV shows are some of the key contributors to the current world-wide explosion in online TV piracy, of which around 18% is revealed to be occurring in Britain.

In the last 12 months, Envisional monitored illegal downloads of 24 and found numbers increasing from an average of 35,000 illegal downloads of each episode from series 3, in 2003/004, to an average of 95,000 downloads from the new series, in 2005, an increase of over 150%.

Downloads of Desperate Housewives are also reported to have shot up, from 40,000 in episode 1 to over 60,000 for the most recent episode.

Commenting on the figures, Ben Coppin, chief operating officer at Envisional said: “The internet is revolutionising how people watch, obtain, and view television programmes. It’s now easy to download a pirate TV show as it is to programme a VCR. While this brings immense power to the TV viewer questions must be asked about how television studios and networks will survive when the advertising so essential to supporting them is deleted and syndication fees are affected.”

Technological advances have contributed to the recent surge in TV Piracy enabling high quality and relatively small downloads. An hour-long TV show is normally encoded to a file of around 350MB which can be downloaded within a couple of hours on a typical home broadband connection.

The quality is good enough that downloads can be watched comfortably on a computer monitor or, when burned on to a CD or DVD, on a television. With the uptake of broadband increasing and costs decreasing, the number of pirate TV programmes being downloaded via the web is increasing dramatically.

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