hulu

It's well established that Rupert Murdoch threw a bit of a hissy fit on Twitter, after public protests helped put SOPA and PIPA on hold.

However, as plenty of people have been pointing out, perhaps the real problem is with Murdoch's (and others') own business model choices.

With 3,620,000 downloads per single episode, Dexter has the honor of becoming the most pirated TV-show of the year.

Despite the fact that Dexter and runner-up Game of Thrones have more downloads than television viewers in the US, the overall number of TV-show downloads is leveling off.

Announcement at Facebook's upcoming F8 conference could involve 'the potential for users to see what their friends are watching on Hulu and share video content between their personal networks,' the New York Post reports.

Read this blog post by Edward Moyer on Digital Media.

More than seven years ago, we first wrote about Ernest Miller's concept of Bitcatching -- a name that never caught on -- which was the combination of RSS + BitTorrent, allowing the ability to "subscribe" to certain video programs.

Miller envisioned that as a legal and useful way for TV broadcasters to embrace the internet with shows that had ads on them, and to avoid the fate of the recording industry.

Of course, that was in the days before YouTube and Hulu existed.

One of the main motivations for people to download and stream TV-shows from unauthorized sources is availability.

If fans can’t get a show through legal channels they turn to pirated alternatives.

This is one of the reasons why Hulu drastically decreased TV-show piracy in the U.S.

Viewers are happy with the legal streaming option it offers them, but not all studios see that as a success.

Journalist Janko Roettgers has been writing about file-sharing and piracy issues longer than most and his P2P-Blog is a collection of good articles dating back many years.

Janko hasn’t been so prolific on that specific subject in recent times because as writer and co-editor of popular news resource GigaOm, his brief is understandably wider.

YouTube is testing a gorgeous new redesign of its website called Cosmic Panda, which features an overhauled user interface, less white space and additional customization of YouTube channels.

As Apple’s iPad 2 hits the market this month, Microsoft is attempting to offer a viable alternative with a slew of videos promoting Windows 7 as shown on one such device, the Asus Eee Slate.

On IBM's developerWorks there's a recent article from Vikram Vaswani about using the oEmbed tool to pull content into your site from sources like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

As the year moves toward its end we have been listing the most pirated entertainment titles of 2010. Following our Top 10 games and movies charts, we now turn to the most downloaded TV-shows.

Lost tops the list this year with over 5 million downloads for a single episode, beating last year's winner Heroes.

TV-shows have traditionally increased in popularity on BitTorrent year after year.

In 2010, however, when we look at the most downloaded titles of the year this growth seems to have levelled off a little.