Game of Thrones Takes Crown for Online Piracy

Correction appended

Game of Thrones rules over all challengers when it comes to online piracy.

Just a few months after setting online downloading records with its season premiere, the hit HBO show has been named the most pirated form of entertainment, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Semetric, a company that monitors online media consumption, says that episodes of Game of Thrones at the height of their popularity make up more than half of all television-related downloads on piracy websites that use the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol — that’s more than the total of all music downloads on those sites.

While the rise of streaming services has somewhat supplanted music piracy, Game of Thrones is still in high demand. The show ended its fourth season in June — when fans downloaded the finale 2 million times within 24 hours — but there are still approximately 300,000 downloads of the series each day.

The original version of this story incorrectly described the role of BitTorrent in Semetric’s findings.

[WSJ]