When will these media companies learn? It’s 2000-freaking-11 and consumers demand easy, fast, content when THEY want it… not when you want.

TorrentFreak decided to track downloads of two Fox shows after the network decided to put an eight day wait on the shows being available on Fox.com and Hulu. Guess what happened? Piracy of those shows went through the roof. TorrentFreak describes Fox’s thinking, “The TV-studio took this drastic step in the hope of getting more people to watch their shows live and thus make more revenue.” As it turns out this completely backfired as viewers turned to “alternative channels” to get their shows.

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.

The music industry was brought to it’s knees when the MP3 became available everywhere, and only started to recover once Apple proved to them that making purchased digitally online could work. The other media industries need to take note. Their old model of controlling distribution is dying… instead of fighting for control they should lower prices, provide easy ways to consume media, and provide the user with choice of how to consume the content.

Get the full scoop at TorrentFreak.