Game of Thrones Finale Breaks Piracy Records

It’s no secret that Game of Thrones is hugely popular, with the show’s season finale having recently aired on TV, torrent websites were dealing with an overload of downloads, causing the TV series to once again set a new record for piracy.

The show was downloaded a staggering 1.5 million times in just eight hours and that total is likely still climbing like crazy as people swoop to watch the show outside of its HBO/Sky Atlantic viewing spot. The total number is expected to exceed 10 million downloads with just a few days.

To put this into perspective, we’ve never heard of something being downloaded is such great numbers, in such a short space of time. Torrent Freak reported that even last year, it would have taken around 12 hours to get to the same number, showing the growing popularity for the show and the increasing popularity of torrenting as a means of accessing TV shows.

The 480p copy of the show was the most popular, no doubt thanks to its smaller file size, making it quicker to download. The 720p and the 1080p copies were the next most popular respectively.

Not only that, but the swarm record was also broken just a few hours later, with 258,131 people sharing the same single torrent at the same time. Game of Thrones has been the most popular torrent three years running, a trend that is unlikely to break when the new season launches some time next year.

Thank you Torrent Freak for providing us with this information.