The fourth time the show has ranked top in the pirate world
Game of Thrones is top of everything - it’s won a staggering 158 awards between 2011-2015 and it’s a firm favourite with millions of fans worldwide. And now, the fantasy drama has scooped another prize: as the most pirated TV show of 2015 for the fourth year running.
Creator George R. R. Martin with some of the Game of Thrones cast
According to Torrentfreak, the season five finale was illegally downloaded 14.4 million times and more than half of those came in the week after the US premiere.
MORE: Game Of Thrones: New The Winds Of Winter Released Online By George R. R. Martin
The HBO drama was mainly downloaded via BitTorrent and the series, in which Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke star, broke records when more than 258,000 users shared the show simultaneously.
Series six of the show is one of the most eagerly anticipated returns ever after a tense finale saw one of the programme’s main characters apparently killed off.
And with all the hype, those who cannot view the show on its original channel are turning to illegal methods to keep up to date.
The number of illegal downloads of the show is almost twice the regular eight million viewers that it pulls in every week.
The first four episodes of season five were leaked online before they aired after one pirate uploaded the content from the DVD screeners sent out to critics to review.
Rounding up the top three most popular illegal downloads is The Big Bang Theory and The Walking Dead.