The finale to season five of Game of Thrones, which aired on Sunday night in the US, has already broken illegal download records, with bigger numbers still to come.
A report on Torrent Freak shows just how big the piracy world is for Game of Thrones nowadays, stating that 1.5m users downloaded the episode just eight hours after its release.
It is expected to peak at 10 million downloads, an incredible number considering the countless efforts to crack down on the free-for-all world of internet downloads.
Yet another Game of Thrones download record
“Never before have we seen this many downloads in such a short period of time, and last year it took half a day to reach the same number,” reads the report, which highlights the fact that lower-quality 480p versions are most popular, presumably because they download far quicker and we’re all impatient nowadays.
However it’s not just total downloads that catch the eye.
The ‘swarm record’ relates to how many people are sharing the episode at the same time. Last year’s season finale set that record, clocking up 254,000 people sharing at one time. Yesterday, that was surpassed by a further 4,000.
It’s basically the most downloaded show around, and has been for a few years now. In fact, ‘Game of Thrones download’ may well be one of Google’s top searched items…
Game of Thrones image, via 2 Top/Flickr
