“Under the Dome” has been a summer hit for CBS and gaining a healthy amount of fans. Unfortunately the fans who have Time Warner Cable, they can no longer watch their favorite show due to the disagreement between CBS and TWC. This may be leading those TWC customers to turn to piracy, according to TorrentFreak.com.
Amid a dispute over retransmission fees (which is on-going), TWC dropped CBS and all its channels last week. TorrentFreak analyzed U.S. BitTorrent downloads and saw a 34 percent increase in the piracy of “Under the Dome.”
TF looked at piracy stats for two “Under the Dome” episodes –“Imperfect Circles” and “The Endless Thirst.” These are the episodes from this week and last week respectively.
In the United States, 10.9 percent of the illegal downloads for “The Endless Thirst” came from areas experiencing the CBS blackout. This number rose by 34 percent to 14.6 percent for downloads of Monday’s “Imperfect Circles”
In eight major cities—New York City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Boston, Denver, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles—there were increases in the amount of piracy from last week’s episode to Monday’s episode.
In New York City piracy rates rose to 3 percent of all downloads in the United States, twice as much as the 1.6 percent from the week before.
(The dispute may have also led to more episode downloads as a whole since statistics showed a minor increase in downloads compared to earlier episodes in the season.)
While the piracy rates have increased, the officials TV ratings for the show have taken a dip. The 11.41 million viewers in last week’s episode dropped to 10.49 million this week.
