'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, families were watching pirated movies and TV shows at the click of a mouse.
TorrentFreak on Monday released its list of the top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent for last week, with two newcomers topping the lineup.
Liam Neeson's Taken 2 sequel and the underwhelming Hit and Run gathered the most downloads over the holidays, making the list for the first time. Meanwhile, last week's top three were jumbled as former champ The Dark Knight Risesfell to No. 4 and The Man with the Iron Fists andThe Bourne Legacy slipped to Nos. 3 and 4, respectively.
Also new to the list were Denzel Washington's boozy pilot in and the mind-numbing antics of the Wachowski siblings' Cloud Atlas, which droped in at Nos. 6 and 7.
While some films on the list of top pirated titles are still available in theaters, a certain amount of people seem to prefer watching them in the comfort of their homes, as demonstrated by Nos. 8 through 10, all of which can be found in select movie houses (if you look really hard). The latest Bond installment, Skyfall, landed in eighth place, down from No. 6 the previous week, while The Perks of Being a Wallflower is barely holding on, falling from fourth to ninth place, just ahead of the time-travel flick Looper.
TorrentFreak counts the most-downloaded films on BitTorrent each week, but got into the end-of-the-year spirit with its report on the most-pirated TV shows of 2012 —HBO's Game of Thrones took home that trophy.
With 4,280,000 downloads for a single episode, according to TorrentFreak, GoT beat last year's winner in that category, Showtime's Dexter, which only snagged 3,850,000 downloads for its most-pirated episode in 2012. Illegal viewers of the sword-and-sorcery show based on George R.R. Martin's best-selling series of books actually exceeded the number of legal U.S. television viewers, estimated at 4,200,000.
Though Game of Thrones had a limited run of just 10 episodes in 2012, its performance on BitTorrent through mid-year was enough to carry it to the overall title.
"Over the years the number of TV-show downloads on BitTorrent has leveled off a bit, but this year we saw a small increase again," TorrentFreak said in a blog post.
More than 80 percent of television piracy occurs outside of the U.S. because of a lack of availability of many shows, especially those produced by cable channels like HBO, Showtime, and Starz.
"For chart leader Game of Thrones this is no different. Airing delays and HBO's choice not to make it widely available online are two of the top reasons why so many people pirate the show," the torrent-tracking site said.
But based on single-episode downloads, shows aired by U.S. networks and basic cable channels such as The Big Bang Theory still filled out most of the top 10 spots on TorrentFreak's list.
CBS's The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother landed in spots three and four, ahead of popular series Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. Meanwhile, Homeland fans don't always have access to Showtime, so instead, thousands of people downloaded episodes of the show's first two seasons.
Rounding out the top 10 list of most-pirated TV shows in 2012 were House, which recently ended its eight-season run on Fox, plus sci-fi thrillers Fringe and Revlution, each topping 2.1 million downloads this year.
TorrentFreak's data is collected from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.
Source: PCmag
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