The Grand Tour is certainly making a grand start when it comes to illegal downloads. Per Variety, the new Amazon Prime motoring show from Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May already has the highest volume of piracy for any British television show in history, and also has the highest level of piracy for a television series in its first season through the first three episodes. The stats come from Muso, a London-based research firm, which clarified the numbers to Variety, following a false report in The Daily Mail that stated the show was already the most-pirated show in television history. To tally the numbers as accurately as possible, Muso “analyzed the most-popular pirated content on Netflix and free-to-air broadcast in the U.K. to get a basis for comparison,†but despite the relatively high numbers for The Grand Tour, it still doesn’t come close to popular American cable programming.
Using a three-week period as a case study, Variety says that the German research firm Tecxipio discovered that episodes of The Grand Tour were downloaded 1.92 million times on peer-to-peer piracy networks, while episodes of The Walking Dead saw 9.87 million downloads. (Game of Thrones, like last year, reigned supreme with tens of millions of downloads.) Last month, Amazon itself said that The Grand Tour broke previous Amazon Prime records after the series premiere, and will likely continue to do so once the show launches in 200 more countries in the coming year.