The Broken Bittorrent Market

By Paul Kedrosky · May 17, 2007 · ·

For all the built-in liquidity in the market for “shared” media — music, games, television, movies, anime, etc. — it is interesting to see that torrent providers and consumers are fairly seriously out of sync.

The figure on the left below is what people are consuming by media type, while the figure on the right is what torrents are being provided. Surprisingly, at least to me, people want television far more than anything else, and the provider side has television and movies about equal.

 

[via TorrentFreak]

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Comments

  1. b. says:
    May 17, 2007 at 10:33 am

    It’s more the opposite. As mentioned in TorrentFreak article – it just means TV series have bigger swarms (more participants per torrent), leading to faster downloads. Market works well – more demanded content is easier to find and faster to get. The magic of BitTorrent.

  2. Paul Kedrosky says:
    May 17, 2007 at 11:27 am

    Ah, I had it backwards. Thanks for the correction. Nevertheless, interesting data.

  3. Jordan says:
    May 17, 2007 at 12:37 pm

    This does look like there is a huge untapped market for downloadable TV.

  4. Bipit says:
    May 17, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    what it actually shows is that there is a discrepancy between what is stored within the torrent mindshare and what is actively being downloaded.
    what a lot of people miss is that not only are torrents a great way to distribute content, they are also a very powerful tool to archive and store data.
    what these graphs show is that TV shows are very popular to download, but movies and music are more popular to store long term. makes sense, no?

  5. Richard Tibbetts says:
    May 21, 2007 at 5:27 am

    What you are seeing is that television is tailor-made for Bittorrent, while movies and music are less so. Bittorrent benefits when a large number of people decide they want the same content at the same time. By regularly and predictably releasing new content, television shows generate a great deal of interest in a short period of time. People are likely to bittorrent a television show they missed within the following week, because they want to stay on top of the plot line and because they know the torrent will be available.
    In contrast, there is not reliable schedule for release of movies or music on bittorrent. So the swarms are going to be smaller. However, the content is more long-lived.