NBC earns the distinction of having their show Heroes being the most pirated television show across the Web. Good for them, because it means people really want to see this thing. It’s not like sites are putting together pirate DVDs of Heroes episodes and selling them willy-nilly on street corners. Well, at least here in Los Angeles they’re not. I checked. One of the reasons that Heroes (and other NBC shows) shot to the top of this list is that NBC decided to sever their relationship with iTunes last year, meaning you couldn’t zap these over to your iPod at $1.99 a pop.
Amazon’s “Unbox” program offers Heroes episodes but they don’t work on the iPod. So you’ve got millions of people out there who want Heroes and Battlestar Galactica for their expensive little toys, and have to turn to BitTorrent to get it. Don’t blame us, NBC. We’re not going into the stores and stealing these off the shelves.
If they offered up formats that worked on iPods and other popular players at a nominal price (no one was really bitching that loudly about a buck ninety-nine), then the network would be able to reclaim some of this revenue stream. But if you keep using Windows-only video files and denying a large portion of your audience the goods, then yes, they’ll find a way to get it.
‘Heroes’ tops the list of most pirated shows of 2007 [TV Squad]
