HBO’s uber-successful television series ‘Game of Thrones’ (GoT) has found a massive audience in pirates, and the figures are just staggering… Reportedly, the second episode this season became the most-downloaded on torrent trackers like ‘The Pirate Bay’ with nearly 200,000 seeds per episode.
Each episode is available in both standard and High Definition. Monday’s episode reportedly garnered 150,000 seeds, with half of them in standard and the other half in HD. These numbers do not take into account duplicate files or users who obtain the episodes without seeding (i.e. take them from friends on a USB).
In comparison to ‘Game of Thrones’, the latest episode of the highly-acclaimed action thriller ‘24: Live Another Day’ garnered a measly 11,000 seeds per episode. Don Draper-starring ‘Mad Men’ and new show ‘Arrow’ were also in-and-around the same mark.
So far, the only show worth mentioning in the same sentence as the American fantasy drama is Chuck Lorre’s popular comedy ‘The Big Bang Theory’, which garners around 25,000 seeds per episode.
Despite the legal issues surrounding online piracy, the show has proven to be a massive hit and something HBO is heavily cashing-in on. If they can somehow find a way to provide official online streaming in different markets across the globe then revenues from this service would prove to be astronomical.