Game of Thrones has been television’s most pirated show for three-straight years, so “people enjoy acquiring Game of Thrones through less than legal methods” isn’t exactly news worth stopping the presses for. What is a little staggering, however, is the ever-increasing scale of the piracy. For example, anti-piracy security firm Irdeto estimates that episodes of the show have been downloaded somewhere in the neighborhood of seven million times in the two months leading up to this weekend’s Season 5 premiere, a 45 percent increase from last year.
From the Guardian:
The download rate averaged 116,000 episodes per day over the sample period in 2015, more than 36,000 per day more than the same period last year.
The data showed that the top country for illegal downloads of Game of Thrones episodes was Brazil, which accounted for almost 1 million of the downloads measured during the snapshot period.
The most fun you can have with this news is rewatching this clip from Fast Five and pretending The Rock is there to investigate Vin Diesel and company for pirating popular television shows.
