# Understanding the evolution of multimedia content in the Internet through BitTorrent glasses

## TL;DR

This study analyzes the evolution of multimedia content on BitTorrent over several years, focusing on availability, popularity, size, and user feedback using large-scale data from The Pirate Bay.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multimedia content trends on BitTorrent, highlighting how content characteristics and user engagement have evolved over time.

## Key findings

- Content availability and popularity trends over years
- Changes in content size and user feedback patterns
- Insights into multimedia content evolution on BitTorrent

## Abstract

Today's Internet traffic is mostly dominated by multimedia content and the prediction is that this trend will intensify in the future. Therefore, main Internet players, such as ISPs, content delivery platforms (e.g. Youtube, Bitorrent, Netflix, etc) or CDN operators, need to understand the evolution of multimedia content availability and popularity in order to adapt their infrastructures and resources to satisfy clients requirements while they minimize their costs. This paper presents a thorough analysis on the evolution of multimedia content available in BitTorrent. Specifically, we analyze the evolution of four relevant metrics across different content categories: content availability, content popularity, content size and user's feedback. To this end we leverage a large-scale dataset formed by 4 snapshots collected from the most popular BitTorrent portal, namely The Pirate Bay, between Nov. 2009 and Feb. 2012. Overall our dataset is formed by more than 160k content that attracted more than 185M of download sessions.