Before buying rights to TV shows, Netflix checks their popularity on torrents.

One of the goals of the American video service Netflix has always been the fight against piracy of TV shows and movies. The company believes that if you have the opportunity to watch any shows and movies for just a few dollars a month, then you will not illegally download them.

But during the launch of the service in the Netherlands, Netflix went so far that it began to use the popularity statistics of TV shows on pirate sites to select the TV shows for which rights are worth buying. Netflix vice president of content acquisition, Kelly Merriman, told the Tweakers website that “when buying TV shows, we look at what is going well on pirated sites,” writes The Verge. So, this led to the purchase of rights to "Escape", a popular TV series on torrents in the Netherlands.

Merriman told the Tweakers about some of the other reasons Netflix chooses the show. For example, the service is not interested in reality shows, news, recordings of concerts and sporting events, since they are more designed for live broadcast.
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TorrentFreak also cites the words of Netflix head Reed Hastings that piracy is not always bad, because it in turn creates demand for content that Netflix offers, and torrent users themselves start using the service.

“Netflix is ​​much simpler than torrents. You do not need to deal with files, you do not need to download them and move. You just press and watch, ”says Hastings.

According to Netflix, after launching a service in Canada, BitTorrent traffic in Canada for three years fell by 50%. At the same time, one of the factors that the series "Game of Thrones" was the most downloaded on torrents in 2012, could be that HBO denied Netflix to buy rights to it.