Thrones is pirates' favourite

HBO's hit series Game of Thrones looks set to become this year's most pirated TV show.

BitTorrent-tracking and analysis firm Big Champagne estimates the second season of the show has been downloaded more than 25 million times from public torrent trackers since it began in early April.

Its piracy hit a new peak following April 30th's episode, with more than 2.5 million downloads in a day, Forbes reported.

"It certainly appears to be the most pirated show of the year," John Robinson, a senior media analyst with Big Champagne told the magazine.

He said it was too early to measure definitively, but the company's data so far as well as the popularity rankings on download site the Pirate Bay point to Game of Thrones as filesharers' favourite show of 2012.

"The fact that it's consistently at the top of the Pirate Bay's top one hundred TV show chart seems like a pretty in-your-face leading indicator of the huge volume at which this is being shared.

While Game of Thrones filesharing rates are probably driven in part by its appeal to the young, geeky male demographic that's most prone to using torrent sites, HBO contributed to the problem by making the show tough to watch online for the young and cable-less, Forbes reports.

The show isn't available through Hulu or Netflix, iTunes offers only Season 1, and using HBO's own streaming site HBO Go requires a cable subscription.

- © Fairfax NZ News