The profitability of television programming is still determined by a statistical system that measures a small sample population and builds out estimated shares each show has amongst the masses.  Regardless of how you feel about the accuracy and precision (or lack thereof) of the numbers, this metric obviously cannot account for all of the other screens TV shows are now running on–particularly, computers.

While it’s relatively easy to figure out how well a show is doing on a legitimate source, like iTunes or XBox, because they keep track of sales figures, as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any serious thought gone into tracking alternative sources of programming–in this case, I refer to Bittorrent trackers.  (For those of you unfamiliar with Bittorrent, it’s a peer-to-peer distribution method that is very useful when sharing large files (>50MB), as it shares the distribution load between all connected nodes.)

I haven’t yet started building out data tables, or analyzing them, but it’s evident that one can quickly verify just how popular a show is by checking to see how many seeds and leechers there are for a certain program in the days following its initial broadcast.  Often times, these will correlate with how popular a particular show is on television; for instance, checking in with btjunkie.org on Tuesday, 18. September, at 5:40 pm, CDT, one can see that the third season premiere of Prison Break has around 33,900 seeds, and 54,000 leechers; Weeds Season 3, Episode 6 has approximately 8,000 seeds and 4,200 leechers; and Californication has 7,500 seeds and 6,000 leechers.  All of these were broadcast the previous evening.

This information could theoretically be even more enlightening, particularly when considering that there are numerous shows not on the American networks that do spectacularly well thanks to this new method of distribution: Doctor Who, Series 3 (or Series 29, depending on how you count them), wrapped up in the Isles a few months ago, and regularly had many thousands of seeds and leechers after every broadcast–but it won’t be broadcast in the States for several more months.  Battlestar Galactica’s (relatively) spectacular American ratings would have been less surprising to pundits and media buyers if they’d seen the Bittorrent seed/leech numbers in the days following their initial British broadcasts (the first season aired in Britain months before they flew here).

Additionally, it’s another data stream that can be used to gauge how successful a show is–particularly critical darlings or cult favorites that don’t seem to be doing well in standard television ratings, but might be doing quite well online–I refer in this case, of course, to Arrested Development.  If alternate streams weren’t used, many other shows, such as the American version of The Office, would have also vanished–strong iTunes sales helped convince NBC to roll out the second season, during which the show truly came into its own.

I will admit that the type of people who use torrents are a small fraction of the actual watching population; they will tend to be much more technically savvy than your average viewer, but by that same token, these are people less likely to be watching television period; the convenience of bittorrent and watching the show sans advertising trumps having to watch at preset times, or even setting up a DVR.

Instead of fighting this, however, I’d like to suggest that perhaps the studios and networks harness and legitimize this in a way that they haven’t yet–release their shows onto the torrent sites themselves, in multiple formats, and WITHOUT DRM: most use Xvid as their encoding method, resulting in half-hour shows averaging around 175MB/233MB, and hour-long shows around 350MB.  Track these numbers, and see how popular some shows are; finally, to actually make this somewhat profitable, instead of interspersing advertising within the television programs in ‘act breaks’, use pre-roll and post-roll advertising, and perhaps even a small watermark in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.  (Left-hand side, if the language is written in the opposite direction…)

To further underscore that I’m not completely crazy, I’d like to point you to two Mindjack articles, referring specifically to the case of Battlestar Galactica: “Hyperdistribution” and “The New Laws of Television“; and one from TorrentFreak, which suggests that record labels are now learning things from p2p that they wouldn’t know otherwise.