Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing is becoming increasingly popular in recent
years. In 2012, it was reported that P2P traffic consumed over 5,374 petabytes
per month, which accounted for approximately 20.5% of consumer internet
traffic. TV is the popular content type on The Pirate Bay (the world's largest
BitTorrent indexing website). In this paper, an analysis of the swarms of the
most popular pirated TV shows is conducted. The purpose of this data gathering
exercise is to enumerate the peer distribution at different geolocational
levels, to measure the temporal trend of the swarm and to discover the amount
of cross-swarm peer participation. Snapshots containing peer related
information involved in the unauthorised distribution of this content were
collected at a high frequency resulting in a more accurate landscape of the
total involvement. The volume of data collected throughout the monitoring of
the network exceeded 2 terabytes. The presented analysis and the results
presented can aid in network usage prediction, bandwidth provisioning and
future network design.Comment: The First International Workshop on Hot Topics in Big Data and
Networking (HotData I