Four episodes into its first season on Amazon, The Grand Tour is already breaking records and making history. That’s what you come to expect from a show that has a budget north of $160 million, but at least one of these records is something the show wants no part of.
Move over, Game of Thrones, because The Grand Tour has just become the most illegally downloaded TV program in history. Or has it?
The auspicious figures were brought to light by MUSO, a leading data analyst of the piracy market, which disclosed that the show’s first episode was downloaded illegally an incredible 7.9 million times. Episode’s 2 and 3 didn’t approach those numbers, but they were still ripped off 6.4 million and 4.6 million times, respectively. Not surprisingly, the British market made up the largest percentage of culprits, accounting for 13.7 percent of the overall total.
It’s a staggering total that a lot of media outlets are running with, and it certainly speaks to the kind of cult-like following that Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May have fostered over their years on Top Gear.
But did it really beat out Game of Thrones as the most illegally downloaded TV program ever? The short and somewhat vague answer is, “it depends on your criteria.”
On a per-episode total, it appears that Jon Snow and company still have the edge over Clarkson and the boys. According to Independent, the first four episodes of GOT’s fifth season were illegally downloaded 32 million times, with the first episode alone contributing 13 million illegal downloads of that total. That number was soon upended by the season finale of the same season – the one where Jon Snow “dies” – with an insane 14.4 million illegal downloads, as per TorrentFreak.
It’s worth noting that none of the analysts that have made these estimates about the illegal downloads of Game of Thrones episodes cited the methodologies they used to track and arrive at those numbers. By contrast, MUSO says that it uses a software that trawls the internet for keywords to identify piracy sites and then analyzes what certain people have watched using those sites.
That’s how they arrived at The Grand Tour’s illegal download figures, something that MUSO chief commercial officer Chris Elkins described as “absolutely incredible,” before adding that it has “overtaken every big show, including Game of Thrones, for the totals across different platforms.”
Regardless of the total and who holds the record over the other, there’s a good chance that neither HBO nor Amazon are inclined to take ownership of it, preferring instead for the other to hold the title.
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
from Top Speed http://ift.tt/2gOqxfZ
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