Sunday night’s Breaking Bad series finale was the most pirated episode of the show on record, with users worldwide downloading 500,000 copies within the first 12 hours of an illegal copy surfacing online, the piracy news site TorrentFreak reports.
About 18 percent of the AMC show’s pirated downloaded came from Australia, 14 percent from the U.S. and 9 percent from the United Kingdom. In a testament to the hype surrounding the finale, U.K. watchers couldn’t wait 24 hours before the episode aired there to watch/
At the peak of Sunday night’s download activity, more than 85,000 people were simultaneously sharing a single copy of the final episode via BitTorrent, a public peer-to-peer file sharing site. But HBO’s Game of Thrones still holds the record for largest BitTorrent swarm ever recorded, with more than 170,000 people sharing a single copy at once.
[Variety]