Game of Thrones Season 4 finale breaks piracy record 

Game of Thrones Season 4 finale breaks piracy record

Season 4 has set a new piracy record for the largest torrent swarm ever.

Torrent Freak has reported that late Sunday night 254,114 people were sharing a single copy of “The Children” at the same time. 190,701 people were sharing a complete copy of the torrent, while 63,413 were still downloading it. This beats out the previous record of 207,054 by quite a large margin, set earlier in the season by the fifth episode.

Of course, these are only numbers for a single torrent, and as seen below, there were multiple copies that garnered quite a bit of interest. Roughly 1.5 million people downloaded the episode within the first 12 hours of its availability.

Torrent Freak expects the episode will end the week at around 7.5 million download, which makes it a safe bet to be the most pirated episode of television this year.

These swarms could be used as a measure relative to the initial viewership numbers from HBO: the amount of people waiting to download and watch the episode as soon as possible.

When compared to last year, the Season 4 finale saw a 48% increase in initial downloads over the Season 3 finale’s 171,572 person swarm. And if Torrent Freak’s prediction of 7.5 million overall downloads holds true, it would mark a 27% increase in total downloads over 5.9 million from the Season 3 finale.

Put these numbers together with the previously reported 32% increase in television viewership for the Season 4 finale, and it becomes even clearer that Game of Thrones’ audience has dramatically increased over the past year, whether they come across the episodes legally, or not.

Tagged episode 410, Piracy, record, season 4, torrent

Game of Thrones Power Rankings: The Children 5 Comments

Last week\'s episode of Game of Thrones was the final episode of season four and it has left us not only with a void for the next year as we wait for …

Have you already read all the books and/or don\'t care about spoilers? You can reveal all the spoilers in the comments with the click of a link below.

That little hedonistic pic puts a smile on my face:)

I know of two people that torrent GoT, I couldn’t though, would feel like stealing, but as for the pleasure of GoT hedonism, it’s the 21st century, get with the program all you living with ancient religious sexual morals. My grandmother was a pastor, God bless her, and she had no problem with sex of any kind. She told me by the time she was 16 she had had sex with six men and loved it, she stole my 37 year old granddaddy away from his wife and three children at the ripe mature age of 16. When I asked if she had regrets, she said no, that a girl or woman should be able to choose whomever she wants to have sex with and at whatever age. That’s feminism in the truest sense of the word.

Come to think of it, I didn’t see Salladhor north of the Wall.

Okay, serious question here. Not being a smart ass, truely. I just want to know: how can those pirating sites, which, if I understand it correctly, are allowing others to steal property, stay in business and make these types of reports without being shut down by the FCC or some such agency?

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