Sunday night ABC aired the final episode of LOST in North America. It was also shown in 59 countries either on the same night, or within 48 hours. It's speculated that ABC chose this schedule to reduce the amount of pirating so that fans could get the full impact of the ending without torrent-based spoilers hitting the Internet. Apparently that didn't work.
It seems that despite ABC's efforts, the final two episodes of LOST have shattered all previous BitTorrent records with close to a million downloads in the first 20 hours. In fact, at peak, more than 100,000 people were sharing a single torrent at the same time. Typically a single episode of LOST is downloaded just under 1.5 million times in its first appearance on BitTorrent. However the two final episodes--What They Died For and The End--are expected to reach four or five million downloads by the end of the week.A large percentage of the downloads come from outside the United States, with 15-percent linked to Australian fans who couldn't wait for the season finale to air on Wednesday night. Anxious fans in other countries experiencing ABC's 48-hour delay also jumped on BitTorrent. Although some of us haven't seen the series conclusion, the controversy surrounding LOST's final hours is also a contributing factor to the record number of downloads on a global scale. There's no doubt that fans who missed the original ABC airings will flock to BitTorrent rather than wait for reruns of the episodes this summer.
Of course, for those who just can't bring themselves to load up BitTorrent, What They Died For and the first half of The End can be seen (with limited commercial interruptions) onlinehere.
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