For the second year running, the HBO series sparks most pirate interest

Dec 27, 2013 07:40 GMT  ·  By

It's hard to think that any network wants to land on this top, but HBO and its hit-TV series “Game of Thrones” have managed to be this year's most pirated TV show in the world. This is the second title for the George R. R. Martin TV adaptation after last year too it landed on the top position.

“Game of Thrones” outranked in terms of popularity in piracy circles some equally famous series, such as AMC's “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead.” These shows ranked second and third respectively.

The news was broke by TorrentFreak, which reports a staggering 5.9 million downloads for this season's finale via BitTorrent. What's more interesting is that more than half of those downloads occurred in the week after the show aired on HBO, and the umber exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the US. Meanwhile, “Breaking Bad” had 4.2 million downloads and “The Walking Dead” 3.6 million.

The reason behind this massive surge of piracy is that HBO keeps a very tight lid on its show, preferring to keep access to the show “exclusive,” meaning that not even Netflix could get the airing rights, no matter how much money they put on the table.

If you're thinking that all this unauthorized distribution is hurting “Game of Thrones,” think again. The director of the show, David Petrarca, thinks piracy actually helped his creation gain “cultural buzz,” while CEOs for Time Warner, HBO's parent company, say that the number of subscriptions has increased following this illegal interest.

But not all people in the industry share the same opinion on pirating TV shows. One producer on “The Walking Dead” thinks that piracy is actually hurting the show because people choose to get it for free, instead of paying the makers and thus returning their investment.

Regardless of what the TV networks think, piracy is not only a phenomenon in its own, but it's also at an all-time high, with signs of growing even larger in the coming year.