the data revealed from piracy tracking firm, Expicio, it has already become the second most pirated TV show on the internet since its release. Expicio’s data indicates that Daredevil has been pirated by more than 2.1 million individual users, second only to HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Surprisingly, the show has been pirated the most number of times in countries where Netflix is already available and offers plans for as low as $10 per month. Brazil leads with 190,274 torrent downloads of Daredevil’s episodes from the time period between the 10th and 16th of April. India (149,316), the U.S. (144,351), the U.K. (119,891), France (105,473) and Australia (101,025) follow as countries with the most number of torrent downloads. It is notable that except for India, Netflix is available in all other aforementioned countries.
Piracy is becoming a major concern for Netflix, mainly outside the U.S, as founder and CEO Reed Hasting and CFO David Wells mentioned in their first quarter 2015 note to shareholders. They also linked it to a graph on Google Trends, indicating that there had been a massive increase in piracy-related searches for Netflix as compared to HBO.
Compared to Daredevil, Game of Thrones has been illegally downloaded more than 6.5 million times after four of its season five episodes leaked a day before HBO’s airing date; however, this still didn’t stop it from registering its best-ever TV viewership. Despite its increasing piracy rates, Netflix reported major quarterly growth in its first quarter of 2015.