For the third year running, Game Of Thrones has topped TorrentFreak’s annual list of the most pirated TV shows, with an estimated 8 million people illegally downloading the fourth season finale of HBO’s fantasy epic. (We’re looking at you, Idaho.) The episode nearly doubled the downloads of the second place finisher, AMC’s The Walking Dead, proving once again that online audiences crave the occasional nipple or dragon to break up the monotony of smashing skulls. (It doesn’t hurt that GoT is still basically impossible to stream legally for those without access to their friend’s mom’s HBO Go account.) It’ll be interesting to see if Thrones maintains its place at the top of the list next year, after HBO debuts its new standalone streaming service in tandem with the fifth season premiere in April.
Third on the list is The Big Bang Theory, presumably playing to the popular demographic of tech-savvy people who have never heard of TBS, followed by the final episode of CBS’s How I Met Your Mother. You can see the full list below, although TorrentFreak doesn’t say which specific episode most of the series listings are for.
1. Game of Thrones: 8,100,000
2. The Walking Dead: 4,800,000
3. The Big Bang Theory: 3,900,000
4. How I Met Your Mother: 3,500,000
5. Gotham: 3,200,000
6. Arrow: 2,900,000
7. Grey’s Anatomy: 2,800,000
8. Vikings: 2,700,000
9. Suits: 2,500,000
10. South Park: 2,400,000
Of course, the list will probably be moot next year, since the high-profile shutdown of popular torrent site The Pirate Bay and arrest of its founders means that Hollywood has finally vanquished digital piracy, forever, and we’ll all be getting our media legally in 2015.
