The time of TV shows being released in the UK long their US release may have to come to an end following the rapid growth of online TV piracy. Programmes such as 24, Lost and Desperate Housewives are often distributed via Peer to peer within 30 minutes to an hour of them being aired in the US. As a result, many consumers not willing to wait for local airing of these programmes in their country are prepared to download them using unofficial sources, such as via The Pirate Bay using BitTorrent, assuming they have a fast connection and are familiar with the steps to download a programme.
According to Dr. Price, head of piracy intelligence at the web monitoring firm Envisional, he estimates that top TV programmes such Lost get over 1 million illegal downloads per episode, particularly with downloading a programme being as straight forward as setting up a VCR timer to tape a show. The UK is considered to be the worst for TV piracy, estimated to be at around 10% to 25% of the global online TV piracy. This is mainly the result of US programming being in English and typically aired up to several months earlier than in the UK.
Unlike downloading movies, many consumers do not see anything wrong with downloading TV episodes, since as consumers do not have to pay by the episode to watch one live on TV, they don't see any loss incurred with downloading it online instead. However, TV show downloads do present a big threat to content providers and broadcasters, particularly for commercial broadcasters that rely on advertisements as their source of income. Should consumers miss a programme, it means a loss for the content provider if the consumer chooses to download it from a free file sharing service rather than from a legitimate pay-per-download service.
The main problem at present is that while many TV shows are available for purchase online, most of these services are limited to the US. This makes it more difficult for anti-piracy organisations to educate consumers that it is illegal to download copyrighted TV shows freely from unofficial sources, particularly when there are no legitimate alternatives yet for some TV programmes in the UK.
Unfortunately, even if legitimate sources are made available for TV programmes, unless programmes can be made available in the UK at the same time they are aired in the US, those not willing to wait for the UK airing are likely going to resort to their old habits.
Further details can be read here on this BBC news source.
