Fox’s stupid 8-Day delay on Hulu sparks increased “piracy”. DUH!

Last week Fox Network announced that they were pulling all day after access for their shows being viewed on Hulu. Needless to say this sparked a bit of outrage but it turns out that outrage may not be the only thing the move has caused.

In a post by Ernesto over at TorrentFreak this morning he reveals that the team at the blog did a little bit of a quick review of download stats for two of the premier shows on the Fox Network: Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef, to see what effect this new 8-day delay was having on torrent downloads of the shows.

Well unsurprising it has as both shows have seen a radical increase in downloads.

Over the last week TorrentFreak tracked two Fox shows on BitTorrent to see if there was an upturn in the number of downloads compared to the previous weeks, and the results are as expected. For both Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef the download numbers have surged.

During the first 5 days, the number of downloads from the U.S. for the latest episode of Hell’s Kitchen increased by 114% compared to the previous 3 episodes. For MasterChef the upturn was even higher with 189% more downloads from the U.S. For MasterChef; the extra high demand may in part have been facilitated by the fact that it was the season finale.

Ernesto also noted in his post that comments on the various torrent sites thanked those who uploaded the shows saying that they had wanted to watch them legal but couldn’t. Meanwhile the comments on Hulu and Fox.com were definitely on the negative side of the scale.

Yup that was a smart move Fox.