Game Of Thrones Maintains Title Of Most Pirated TV Show For Second Year In A Row

And here’s their acceptance speech, “I’d like to thank the cable companies for keeping a strangle hold on paid channels, the internet, and especially HBO for letting us show so much crazy sh*t.” 

In 2012, Game of Thrones was the most pirated show on television ahead of Dexter and The Big Bang Theory. While we knew the Season 3 finale episode “Mhysa” broke piracy records after airing in June, there was a lot of television left to go. But as TorrentFreak reports, nothing could compare.

Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most downloaded TV-show for the second year in a row.

With 5.9 million downloads via BitTorrent, the 2013 season finale has beat the competition by a landslide.

More than half of the downloads occurred in the first week after the show aired and the total exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the US. Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead complete the top three with and estimated 4.2 and 3.6 million downloads respectively.

Gotta admit, I’m shocked Breaking Bad didn’t come out on top considering the anticipation of their finale, and that The Walking Dead is so high up. TorrentFreak points out AMC streams the series online for free. Here’s the top ten list for this year:

1. Game of Thrones
2. Breaking Bad
3. The Walking Dead
4. The Big Bang Theory
5. Dexter
6. How I Met Your Mother
7. Suits
8. Homeland
9. Vikings
10. Arrow

Earlier this year, HBO made a deal with Google to provide episodes of Game of Thrones and more in their Google Play store. The number one spot also comes in a year where Game of Thrones director David Petrarca publicly said piracy wasn’t really all that bad, then had to backpedal when HBO disagreed.

(via The Verge)

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Jill Pantozzi

Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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