HBO's "Game of Thrones" is one of the most watched TV shows in primetime. And the show is also the most pirated TV shows of 2014. The program, about the battle of becoming ruler of all the kingdoms, beat out AMC's "The Walking Dead" and "Breaking Bad" for the most pirated TV show.

According to a new report by TorrentFreak.com, which was released this week, "Game of Thrones" is downloaded and watched illegally more often than not. While the show itself has a large, growing fan base and millions of viewers that watch it every week, there are millions more who pirate it.

TorrentFreak.com, who completed the report and compiled a list of the most pirated TV shows, noted that "Game of Thrones" is in its third year for being the most illegally downloaded TV show. The show's 2014 Season Four finale put the show at more than 8 million illegal downloads via BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is a computer program that uses "peer-to-peer" file sharing which distributes large amounts of data over the Internet. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files; this kind of usage has been estimated to account for about 43 to 70 percent of all Internet traffic as of February 2009 -- this is dependant on the geographical location.

The pirating of "Game of Thrones" is not that surprising. Earlier this year, the show had more than 254,114 peers that shared the same torrent file simultaneously. Uber popular shows like "Game of Thrones" and others have caused online piracy to increase rather than decrease.

"Game of Thrones" is a huge hit for HBO -- it even surpassed viewership of "The Sopranos" as one of the most watched HBO shows of all time. At least 7.1 million people tuned in to watch the show's fourth season finale, Time reported.

"Game of Thrones" is not alone in the online piracy. The show is No. 1 on the pirated list, followed by AMC's "The Walking Dead" with almost 5 million downloads, and CBS' "The Big Bang Theory" and "How I Met Your Mother" have almost 4 million downloads; and, then the superhero dramas such as "Gotham" and "Arrow" came in at 3 million and 2.9 million respectively, Torrent Freak reported. AMC's "The Walking Dead" has an average of 17 million TV viewers.

Things might change for "Game of Thrones" when HBO launches its standalone streaming service in 2015.

Torrent Freak's most pirated TV shows list came up with its based on data from several sources, which include downloaded statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers. The list however does not include online streaming and downloads for file hosting services.

In other words, the total piracy numbers might be even larger.

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