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Game of Thrones is Top Illegally Downloaded TV Show of 2016

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Jon Snow may know a whole lot of nothing, but he does know something about getting audiences hooked—and staying hooked—on a television show. For the fifth consecutive year, HBO’s Game of Thrones was named the most illegally downloaded TV show on the Internet, according to TorrentFreak, an online publication that tracks the number of times shows are pirated.

It’s no surprise, especially after the series’ intense fifth season cliffhanger back in 2015, when fan favorite Jon Snow was killed by his Night’s Watch brothers, that viewers would be coming back in droves for season 6 to find out how the show would move on from this untimely death.

Time Warner-owned HBO, however, costs users a pretty penny, and even its standalone app is the one of the most expensive streaming apps available. If you’re unwilling to pay the extra fee on your cable bill for the premium channel, or the $14.99 per month for HBO Now, or you don’t have access to a friend’s or family member’s HBO account, then you may have resorted to illegally downloading Game of Thrones form torrent sites.

AMC’s The Walking Dead came in second, while HBO’s other hit drama Westworld took third place. Rounding out the Top 10 most pirated shows were The CW’s The Flash and Arrow, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, The History Channel’s Vikings, Fox’s Lucifer, USA Network’s Suits, and Amazon’s (AMZN - Free Report) The Grand Tour, a show about British car enthusiasts.

Season 7 of Game of Thrones is set to premiere later than usual, in mid-2017, and will consist of only seven episodes instead of the usual ten. Ratings for last season, which included critically acclaimed episodes “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Winds of Winter,” yet again rose compared to the previous season, and as the series comes to a close, expect torrent downloads to rise with a vengeance.

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