After surveying BitTorrent download traffic for Matrix: Revolutions last month I thought I'd check out download traffic for a movie that didn't suck.
Return of the King traffic is about the same as Matrix Revolutions: lots of traffic early, then the tracker crashes. People were successful though: several thousand probably got the whole file before the tracker died, patient ones could finish when the tracker was restarted, and there were at least 10 other torrents out there.

10,000 people grabbing a 2 gig file is a lot of video on demand. Still, crappy quality. The one sample I saw had decent sound and the picture didn't shake but the colour was all washed out. The cinematography in ROTK is so beautiful $9 is a bargain.

techbittorrent
  2003-12-30 23:32 Z