House of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are the two great powerhouses of modern TV fantasy drama. Both shows have amassed a remarkable amount of viewers on legit streaming platforms, but the pirate underground seems to have a particular liking for HBO’s dragons-filled production. According to the numbers provided by I Know, House of the Dragon wins pirate users’ favor by a very wide margin: in the given timeframe, the GoT prequel saw more than 1.4 million estimated downloads on peak days. In total, HotD amassed over nine million downloads in two weeks.
As for the countries with the most House of the Dragon downloads, the data sampled by I Know shows that Russia is in the lead. It’s a sign of the times, considering how much Russian users are cut off from access to legal services as a result of international sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine. HotD pirate downloads are also rather popular in Brazil, the US, India, the UK, South Africa, China, Philippines, Australia and France.
TorrentFreak highlights how public torrent downloads are just a small fraction of the entire piracy activity nowadays, as most users have switched from peer-to-peer sharing to streaming sites whose activity cannot be measured so easily. Rating HotD popularity is an interesting exercise anyway, as Game of Thrones was the most torrent-shared TV show of the past years.
