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Pay TV shows top global piracy

Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead top the list of most illegally-downloaded in 2013.

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GOT3_Peter Dinklage as Tyrion LannisterGame of Thrones has been dubbed the most illegally downloaded show for the second year in a row.

Website Torrent Freak tallied the 10 top shows, with Game of Thrones at 5.9m easily in front of Breaking Bad at 4.2m downloads.

This year Time Warner Inc. CEO Jeff Bewkes said that being the most-pirated TV show was “better than an Emmy.”

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, estimated at 5.5m viewers.

The Walking Dead is at #3 with 3.6 million downloads.

1 Game of Thrones 5,900,000
2 Breaking Bad 4,200,000
3 The Walking Dead 3,600,000
4 The Big Bang Theory 3,400,000
5 Dexter 3,100,000
6 How I Met Your Mother 3,000,000
7 Suits 2,600,000
8 Homeland 2,400,000
9 Vikings 2,300,000
10 Arrow 2,200,000

6 Responses

  1. Another big factor is that some of these shows are ones you don’t want spoiled. So people download them not to get them ruined. It’s not so much of a, ‘I must have it.’ It’s part of, ‘I have to watch it now or it’ll be ruined by spoilers.’ Then wanting to be part of the social experience in discussing what’s happening on the show. On the list though, I watch,

    Game of Thrones
    Breaking Bad
    Dexter
    How I Met Your Mother
    The Walking Dead
    Vikings
    Arrow.

    I have foxtel though. It is interesting though, a lot are my favorite shows. Dexter final sucked though, but I enjoyed it right until that last 10 minutes or so. Betrayed the entire premise of the show and character(s).

    So I wonder what that says. I have seen some of homeland but the show is stupid and so I stopped. It’s well made, but it’s stupid and insults the viewers intelligence. I used to…

  2. Thinking about this I wonder how much downloading Sherlock will get. Because it does have a strong online interest. Plus America has to wait weeks for it to show up. Let alone the unknown amount of time Australia will have to wait. The other option is to get the DVDs or Blu-rays from the UK. Especially as I believe they are the same region with the Blu-rays. I just dread the inevitable spoilers.

    @ Pertinax

    I thought Foxtel bought the exclusive rights or something and stopped the iTunes option. Or is that from now on? Or something else. Because if they did then there is no other option for some except wait. And they don’t want to do that.

  3. Paying on only one channel doesn’t help you. You still have to pay for the networks and admin costs. In the US premium channels are sold seperately. And it’s $38/month for basic cable and $20/month for the premium channels.

    Over the Internet you can pay per view on top of your broadband charges. Game of Thrones was available here on itunes for $3/ep here, didn’t reduce the illegal downloading much.

  4. I will admit I was so curious to see Game of Thrones because of all the fuss caused by it. Both the Emmy Awards and the like as well as the downloading. Although it also looked like my type of show. So I borrowed the DVDs from the library to see if they were worth owning. They are; so got the DVDs from a store. I guess I’m lucky I suffer from – I don’t need to see it now syndrome – most of the time. I can easily wait for any future DVD releases.

  5. Not hard to work out why… You can’t just buy the channels you want, you have to fork out an arm and a leg to build an overpriced pyramid of channel “packages” until you finally get the one (or ones) you want.

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