According to a report by TorrentFreak, Game of Thrones is now the most pirated TV show this spring.
While the show had almost 5.5 million viewers as it ran from March to June, the buzz around this HBO show was apparent as it registered almost 5.2 million downloads via Bittorrent. Of course, the numbers could be higher as online streaming and cyberlocker downloads weren’t counted.
In fact, the show’s third season premiere broke pirating records where just hours after the first episode was uploaded, 163088 people were already sharing the torrent, according to the OpenBitTorrent tracker. In fact, as TorrentFreak found out, 110300 people were already sharing a complete torrent while 52786 were downloading the torrent at that time.
With that, Game of Thrones has ousted Showtime’s Dexter to be ‘honored’ as the most pirated TV show in 2012, which the latter had held the previous year.
However, and quite surprisingly, Michael Lombardo, HBO’s programming president, isn’t upset at all with this TV show being pirated but actually considers it to be a “compliment of sorts” as it hasn’t affected DVD sales at all.
Thrones outpaced its competition with the number of pirated downloads as CBS’ The Big Band Theory took the second spot at 2.9 million torrents squeaking past CBS’ How I Met Your Mother which registered 2.85 million torrents.
New shows that made the TorrentFreak list were NBC’s ‘Hannibal’, History Channel’s ‘Vikings’ and CW’s ‘Arrow’.
