‘Game Of Thrones’ Continues To Be Most-Pirated TV Show Of The Last Several Years

The yearly stats on the most-torrented television shows are in, and unsurprisingly, Game of Thrones tops the list yet again. Copyright and privacy news site TorrentFreak discovered the HBO fantasy series came in as the most-pirated TV show of 2015 with more than 14.4 million illegal downloads.

Game of Thrones has a track record of landing at the top of the most-pirated charts. In 2013, TorrentFreak found the season finale of season three of Game of Thrones was one of the top two most-downloaded shows alongside Breaking Bad. Then in 2014, piracy-tracking firm Excipio discovered HBO’s drama fantasy had claimed more than 48.369 million estimated torrents across the web, while TorrentFreak’s stat for the same year was around 8.1 million illegal downloads. According to TorrentFreak’s number, Game of Thrones pirating more than doubled in 2015.

AMC’s The Walking Dead claimed the #2 most-torrented spot on TorrentFreak’s 2015 chart with about 6.9 million downloads, up more than 2 million from 2014’s 4.8 million illegal downloads. The Walking Dead was also the second most-pirated show in 2014, according to Excipio’s number of 47.6 million torrents. Additionally, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory resumed its third place on the most-pirated chart for 2015, with 4.4 million illegal downloads (the geek-themed comedy series was also 3rd last year on Excipio’s chart with 33.4 million torrents).

“Overall there is no sign that TV-show piracy is declining, on the contrary,” wrote TorrentFreak’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief Ernesto Van der Sar in a company blog post. “The download numbers for the most popular shows continues to rise, sometimes exceeding the number of traditional viewers in the US.”

Check out more of TorrentFreak’s 2015 piracy findings by reading the site’s corresponding blog post.