With 5.9 million downloads via BitTorrent, the 2013 season finale has beat the competition by a landslide.

More than half of the downloads occurred in the first week after the show aired and the total exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the US. Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead complete the top three with and estimated 4.2 and 3.6 million downloads respectively.

Game of Thrones’ win comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records already this year, with over 170,000 people sharing a copy of an episode simultaneously.

There are a wide variety of reasons why people download TV-shows, but to a certain degree one could claim that HBO is to blame for the massive piracy of Game of Thrones. The network prefers to keep access to the show “exclusive” and even Netflix wasn’t able to buy the rights no matter what they offered.

Interestingly enough, we also learned this year that the huge number of unauthorized downloads don’t bother the show’s makers all that much, quite the contrary. Game of Thrones director David Petrarca previously admitted that piracy generated much-needed “cultural buzz” around his show.

Jeff Bewkes, CEO of HBO’s parent company Time Warner, went even further, stating that piracy resulted in more subscriptions for his company and that receiving the title of “most-pirated” was “better than an Emmy.”

On the other end of the spectrum we have Gale Anne Hurd, executive producer of The Walking Dead, who told Variety last week that unauthorized downloads are not necessarily the blessing others claim they are.

“There’s a mistaken belief by many of my peers that piracy is somehow good, that viewers will develop a habit to pay for it. I’m not sure they really understand other than anecdotal evidence that their ratings go up that the people who pirate are not then going to choose legal downloads or legal viewing in the future,” Hurd said.

Hurd has a point, as it’s not always that easy for existing pirates to give up their habit, not even if the legal options are widely available and free. For example, The Walking Dead premiere this year was downloaded en masse in the US, despite the fact that AMC streamed the show for free.

This debate about whether TV-show piracy is a good or bad thing will most likely continue throughout the coming year, and beyond.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide ( per single episode) for 2013, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data are estimated by TorrentFreak based on several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

It is worth nothing that online streaming and cyberlocker downloads are not included since there are no public sources to draw data from. The total piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In some cases people had to wait up to a year to view their favorite show after the U.S. release, which is unacceptable for most die-hard fans.

Responding to this criticism the TV industry has systematically improved traditional release windows. The recent premiere of The Walking Dead’s fourth season is a prime example of how the industry is adapting to the signals pirates have been sending for years.

To remove one of the incentives for people to grab an unauthorized copy of the show, Fox International Channels premiered the show in 125 countries a day after it first aired on US television.

“We want to prevent the spoilers for sure, we also want to make sure [international viewers] get the best version of the show — not some pirated version,” Liz Dolan, Fox International Channel’s chief marketing officer told The Wrap.

Unfortunately for Fox, however, pirated versions are available in better quality than most legal streaming options. Also, the download numbers have not declined, quite the opposite.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that 16 hours after the first episode appeared online more than half a million people had grabbed a copy through one of many torrent sites. This is more than last year’s season premiere, despite the legal viewing options.

Interestingly, most downloaders come from the U.S. where there is no release lag at all.

Based on a sample of more than 30,000 people who shared the show via a BitTorrent client, we see that the United States is in the lead with 15.5 percent of the total. This means that even though people can stream the episode for free, many still preferred to download it through a torrent site.

In the U.K and Australia there was a slight delay but even legal availability couldn’t prevent people from pirating the season opening. With 11.7 and 10.1 percent these countries are second and third respectively. The Philippines and Canada complete the top five with 8.8 and 6.8 percent of the total.

Fox has to be applauded for making the show available quickly in so many territories, something that was unthinkable half a decade ago. It’s safe to say that the download numbers would have been much higher without these efforts, although at the moment piracy is far from defeated.

In part this might be because some prefer the unauthorized download option simply out of habit. This is especially true for U.S. file-sharers. As we reported earlier this year, many people who pay for a Netflix subscription downloaded Netflix’s exclusive Arrested Development release, preferring the download experience over online streaming.

There is also another group, one that simply doesn’t want to pay for a subscription, which is required in Australia for example. It’s also possible that they are just unhappy with the viewing options currently on offer. In many countries viewers still have to tune in at a fixed time slot while many prefer to program their own viewing schedule.

The challenge for the entertainment industry is to take away these leftover incentives, and make sure that the legal options become the default. For some people it may be too late to be converted, but for most there’s still hope.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The achievement comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records in a few weeks, and the high number of unauthorized downloads has been widely covered in the press.

Even before the third season started there was already a lot of talk about Game of Thrones piracy. Interestingly, many of the people connected to the show saw it as a compliment rather than a major threat that needs to be dealt with.

The most outspoken position was taken by David Petrarca, the show’s director, who noted that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. According to the director, pirates are partly responsible for the “cultural buzz” the show needs to thrive and survive.

After the season got underway some critical notes also appeared. The Ambassador of the United States of America to Australia recently complained about the “plain theft” being carried out by Australians.

This was countered by many self-confessed pirates including Timo Vuorensola, director of the Disney movie Iron Sky. The Finnish director told HBO that their legal service “sucks” and promised to download the show from The Pirate Bay instead.

The end result is that the most shared episode of Game of Thrones, the season opening, was downloaded by 5.2 million people all over the world. This dazzling statistic represents a 25 percent increase compared to last year and three times the amount achieved by several of the TV shows further down the top 10.

The increase in viewers wasn’t limited to the pirated channels though. HBO also saw ratings for Game of Thrones increase by roughly a quarter, driving many new customers to their paid subscriptions.

Whether the number of legal viewers would be higher or lower without piracy is hard to measure, but it could go both ways.

Looking at the full list we see that it contains many household names that have done well over the years, such as The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, which are listed in second and third place respectively.

There are also some notable newcomers. In fact, three shows in the list of most pirated shows just completed their first season – Hannibal, Vikings and Arrow. All three achieved between one and two million downloads per episode.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide (estimates per single episode) for the spring season from March up until June 2013, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

It is worth nothing that online streaming and cyberlocker downloads are not included since these can’t be measured accurately. The full piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

These figures understandably caused much debate, but left show director David Petrarca quite unruffled. During a panel discussion at the University of Western Australia the 47-year-old said that shows like Game of Thrones thrive on “cultural buzz” and benefit from the social commentary they generate. Piracy, he said, helps to oil those wheels.

But Petrarca wasn’t the only show associate with the impression that piracy might have its benefits. Just a couple of weeks later and the show’s actors were weighing in, with Rose Leslie, who plays Ygritte, describing it as a plus.

“I don’t think HBO will be too happy, but yes, one way or another that’s a huge compliment. Not just to me but to the show as a whole,” she said.

With Season 3 of the smash-hit series getting underway last night, HBO have also commented on the piracy situation but in a quite unexpected way. Rather than come out guns blazing they actually agree with Leslie – piracy is indeed a form of flattery.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming president Michael Lombardo told EW. “[Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

For HBO to publicly admit that piracy is even a partial positive comes as quite a surprise, but it becomes even more interesting when Lombardo talks about its effect on revenue streams.

Last month Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor who plays Jaime Lannister in the show, said that although people watch the show online, he hoped they would still go out and buy the DVD or Blu-ray. And guess what? According to HBO, they do.

“The demand is there,” Lombardo said. “And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales.”

These comments from HBO are significant and underline what many observers have suspected all along. If you have a great product you should expect piracy, but you can also count on large numbers of people to support your efforts financially too. Every viewer – paid or unpaid – is a potential ambassador for the show and therefore a valuable part of the marketing cycle.

It’s too early to say whether Episode 1 of Season 3 will break last year’s download stats but the signs are already there. Last night’s show rocketed straight to the top of The Pirate Bay’s charts for most active torrent, driving way ahead of its nearest competitor, episode 16 of season 3 of The Walking Dead.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At one point during the summer of 2007 a massive 8 new episodes were released with a PREAIR tag in just one week, including hit series such as Dexter, Weeds and Chuck.

In recent years, however, PREAIR releases have become a rarity. Before the start of the fall season of 2010, the only notable PREAIR leak was a Weeds episode.

Despite this declining trend, there are still a few notable releases that are worth mentioning, such as the premiere episode of The Walking Dead that surfaced online yesterday. The new series is written and produced by three-time Academy Award-nominee Frank Darabont, known for films such as The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.

The Walking Dead is based on the similarly named comic book and tells the story of a group of survivors after a zombie apocalypse.

The series will officially premiere in the US on the AMC network on October 31, but already thousands of people have downloaded the file online. According to most of the ‘amateur’ reviews we’ve read the quality isn’t all that great, but good enough to watch. Content wise there were few complaints.

AMC hasn’t officially responded to the leaks thus far, but we doubt that they will be bothered too much by the free publicity. It is often suggested that some of these leaks might even be intentional, that broadcasters use them to hype the show just before the season starts. Although this is often impossible to confirm, it would not be the first time that this has happened.

In 2007, a Warner Bros executive admitted that he helped to leak the pilot of ‘Pushing Daisies’. The exec wanted to make sure the show “got out there,” and said his goal was to “help the cause.” He didn’t upload it himself though, but used his neighbor’s kid to do it instead.

The leak of The Walking Dead premiere, whether intentional or not, is guaranteed to boost the show’s momentum through word of mouth promotion. If anything it will help the show, rather than hurt it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.