CBS Blackout Leads to Increase in TV-Show Piracy

LOS ANGELES: The percentage of unauthorized downloads in the markets affected by Time Warner Cable’s CBS blackout has spiked dramatically this week, according to TorrentFreak, which reports on Internet file-sharing.

TorrentFreak reports that piracy rates for the summer event series Under the Dome rose 34 percent over the weekend, while official ratings dropped.

To measure the effects, TorrentFreak monitored U.S. BitTorrent downloads of last week’s episode as well as the one that aired this Monday, after the blackout. The data shows that in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh, relatively more people downloaded the latest episode.

In New York City, one of the largest areas affected by the blackout, the relative piracy rate more than doubled, from 1.3 percent of all U.S. downloads last week to 3 percent for the episode that aired after the channel was dropped.

Worldwide, the latest episode of Under the Dome was downloaded slightly more than previous episodes. This means that the relative increase in piracy rates also resulted in more downloads.

"While one should always be careful of drawing strong conclusions from city-based data, especially when we don’t know how many downloaders are Time Warner Cable subscribers, these initial results do suggest that the blackout resulted in a local piracy surge," said TorrentFreak.