HBO's Game of Thrones appears set to keep its crown as the most-pirated TV show as Sunday night’s season five finale set a new record of 1.5 million downloads in a span of eight hours, according to TorrentFreak, a site focused on file-sharing and privacy and copyright issues.
By comparison, it took about half a day last year for an episode of GoT to hit such a lofty piracy figure.
TorrentFreak said it expects that number to “swell to over 10 million during the days to come,” noting that the season finale also set a record for the number of people sharing a single file at the same time. At last check, TorrentFreak said 258,131 people were sharing a single torrent of the season five finale, with 181,075 sharing a complete copy of that particular torrent, with another 77,056 still in the process of downloading it.
The site said lower quality copies (480p) of the show remains the most popular among illegal downloaders, followed by copies in 720p and 1080p.
According to TorrentFreak, Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV-show three years running, and is positioned for a fourth.
Heading into season five, Irdeto likewise had GoT as the most-pirated show, finding that episodes from the first four seasons were downloaded more than 7 million times between February 5 and April 6, followed by AMC’s The Walking Dead (5.7 million illegal downloads), History’s Vikings (3.4 million) and Netflix’s House of Cards.
