The opening ceremony of the 2008 summer Olympics, co-directed by Zhang Yimou, was a truly spectacular event. Not everyone had the chance to watch it live, but that’s where BitTorrent comes in. The broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremony has been downloaded more than a million times already, and the download counters go up every day.

The most popular version of the opening ceremony is the HD release, a massive 5GB file. At the time of publication more than 60,000 people are downloading the torrent, while over a million people have already downloaded the opening ceremony via BitTorrent - even though it was free to watch on TV all around the world.

Other releases of the Olympics ceremony are popular as well, such as an iPod ready version of the first hour, a standard definition release of the opening ceremony, and a high definition capture of the torch lighting and fireworks. Three Olympic shows would have made it into our weekly TV-download chart, but we decided to count them as one.

The data of the TV-torrent chart is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony

Pirating the Olympics via P2P TV: An Experiment

NBC’s delayed Olympics coverage and sports’ fans quest to find pirated livestreams online has officially become the media story of the games. Even the New York Times has chimed in, noting what it referred to as the “game of digital whack-a-mole” between pirates and NBC that took place during the opening ceremony. The network’s fight against unauthorized streams on sites like Ustream.tv and Justin.tv continued all weekend, with streams going down quicker that you can say Dick Ebersol.


Guide to Watching Online

International proxies: It is possible to watch live streams from other countries, such as BBC Sports from the UK or CBC Sports from Canada, by configuring your browser to run through an anonymous proxy. I recommend using Mozilla's Firefox browser with the FoxyProxy add-on installed. Xroxy has a handy list of proxies which you can sort by country to find proxies in the UK or Canada — which must be anonymous, and preferrably running the SOCKS protocol. Your best bet is to get a geeky British or Canadian friend to install a proxy on their machine for you and your Yankee friends. The latency can be frustrating, but once you get a stream started it will work fine.