Game Of Thrones Season 3 Premiere Was Hottest Torrent Download Of All Time; HBO Boasts 4.4M Viewers
In less than a day the season three premiere of HBO's fantasy epic Game of Thrones received one million downloads on BitTorrent and shattered multiple records, according to TorrentFreak.
According to the website, no torrent has ever been shared by so many individuals at the same time after more than 160,000 simultaneous peer users logged on in the last 24 hours since the show premiered on Sunday night.
Of that number, 110,303 were sharing a complete copy of that specific torrent while 52,786 were still downloading.
TorrentFreak contended that the number of downloads represented "mindboggling numbers."
Previously, the highest recorded BitTorrent "swarm" came during the series premiere of Heroes in 2005 with about 145,000 peer users, the site reported.
Additional data provided by TorrentFreak contends that the United States had the most users download the torrent but Australia is the country with the highest piracy rate of the world's popular download destinations and London is at the top of the list comprising the world's pirate cities.
As far as television ratings, the Game of Thrones season three premiere boasted an average of 4.4 million viewers at 9:00 p.m. EDT on Sunday night which was an improvement upon its previous record of 4.2 million during the season two premiere.
Although the live results were impressive, HBO will expect a lot more views will be tallied once the on-demand, DVR and online streams of the series premiere are counted towards the total.
According to HBO, Game of Thrones had an average audience of 11.6 million viewers when the millions of people who did not watch the show live were included in the pot.
Sunday night's premiere was a substantial increase upon last season's premiere, which raked in 3.9 million viewers.
But TorrentFreak claims HBO does not believe piracy is killing the show and may actually, in fact, be helping it.
The channel's programming president Michael Lombardo views piracy as a compliment which will not have a detrimental effect on DVD sales, according to TorrentFreak.
