The Matrix: Revolutions had a complex worldwide simultaneous release, ostensibly to fight piracy. Piracy happened anyway; 24 hours after the release, copies showed up on the net for download. Badly compressed movies of shaky camcorder copies. Pay the $9, folks.

Using the same /scrape URL that torrentspy uses, I tracked the BitTorrent activity of a 1.2G copy of the movie over the last week (from the day after movie release).

The main story this data tells is that a lot of folks tried to download the movie: 8500 at the peak, roughly the most people I've ever seen hit a single BitTorrent. The gaps are when the tracker was down; I'm surprised that so many people stuck around when it came back up. I'm also surprised at how many people stuck around to serve the file after downloading it; a steady 20% or more after things settle down.

For what it's worth, this graph pattern is common for all the popular torrent streams I've monitored. The big variance seems to be how long the tracker survives.

techbittorrent
  2003-11-13 16:02 Z