HBO’s Game of Thrones has topped the list of the 10 most downloaded shows for the spring, as ranked by TorrentFreak, The Hollywood Reporter said.
The rankings, which estimates the total downloads per episode for March through June, say Thrones was downloaded 5.2 million times per episode. That’s more than 2 million more than No. 2 on the list, CBS’ The Big Bang Theory (2.9 million downlaods) and No. 3, CBS’ How I Met Your Mother (2.85 million downloads).
Three freshmen shows cracked the top ten, with NBC’s Hannibal coming in at No. 5 with 2.1 million downloads, History’s Vikings at No. 6 with 1.9 million, and the CW’s Arrow at No. 7 with 1.85 million.
Thrones is the only show on the list whose downloads are close to its US TV viewers (5.5 million). For example, The Big Bang Theory’s 20 million viewers per episode is nearly seven times the number of its illegal downloads.
Thrones has a knack for setting piracy benchmarks, with the season 3 finale notching a record 170,000 simultaneous shares on BitTorrent. The series was also named the most pirated TV show of 2012, hitting 4.28 million downloads with one episode.
