The Internet makes it easy to access TV shows, movies and PC games without having to purchase them in stores. "Game of Thrones" fans use the Internet the most to watch their favorite show, and they don't always do it legally.
The HBO fantasy series was the most torrented TV show in the United States over the last 40 days, real estate blog, Movoto, reported on Aug. 12. The show ranked number one in 15 states. New Showtime series "Penny Dreadful" ranked second, ahead of popular series "24" and "The Big Bang Theory."
"Game of Thrones'" viewers crashed HBO Go, the channel's streaming service, during the season four premiere on April 6. The 6.6 million viewers broke HBO's biggest audience record since the finale of "The Sopranos." The website crash was credited to people stealing the service by using friends and families' log-ins, according to the Guardian.
Movoto analyzed torrenting behavior using data from 4 million seeding nodes, 3 million unique IP addresses and hundreds of copyrighted TV, game and movie titles. A seeding node is any computer that has downloaded content and can be used by other computers to access the same content.
For movies, "Captain America" ranked number one in four states and "Godzilla" ranked highest in three states. "Non-Stop," "Wolf of Wall Street," "A Million Ways to Die in the West," "Witching and B****ing" and "Noah" ranked highest in two states each.
The most popular game torrented was "Watch Dogs." The open world action-adventure video game ranked number one in 19 states.
The research also found that Hawaii, Florida, Vermont and Washington state torrent the most content. South Dakota, West Virginia and Iowa ranked at the bottom. Movie torrenting ranked highest in Ohio, Rhode Island, Florida, Wyoming and Nevada.
