Game of Thrones has for the last four years held the dubious honor of being the most illegally downloaded show on television. It has been surpassed by The Grand Tour to become “the most illegally downloaded program in history.”
According a new report published by MUSO, a data analyst group that studies piracy, the opening three episodes of the first season of the Grand Tour were downloaded nearly 19 million times.
According to the report, the season five finale of Game Of Thrones was downloaded roughly 14.4 million times, as compare to the 8.1 million who tuned in to view the episode.
Amazon has not published total viewership of the Grand Tour, merely stating that “millions” tuned in to the premiere, and that it broke Amazon’s premiere viewership record previously set by The Man In The High Castle.
In 2015, The Walking Dead came was the second most illegally downloaded with 6.9 million downloads, The Big Bang Theory came in third with 4.4 million, and series Arrow and The Flash were among the top five.
However in 2016, The Grand Tour beat them by what MUSO’s CCO calls, “off the scale in terms of volume.”
The show is hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May, who previously the popular show Top Gear until Clarkson was fired by BBC for physical and verbal attack on a producer.
Amazon had hoped to attract subscribers in UK to their prime streaming service as the country makes up only an estimated 2 million of their 63 million worldwide subscribers.
The new three-season production cost Amazon a record-setting $160 million, price tag, including $3.4 million for the opening scene.
MUSO estimates Amazon may have lost around $4 million in the UK alone, as pirates have been able to evade the $99 per year Prime subscription fee
