Game of Thrones season 6 finale hit over one million downloads through BitTorrent in just 8 hours

No let-up in GoT piracy despite HBO efforts.

The Game of Thrones season 6 finale generated huge traffic on torrent sites, although it wasn't enough to break the record set by the series in 2015.

According to data TorrentFreak has access to, within just eight hours as many as a million people downloaded the final episode of the season through BitTorrent. Millions more are expected to download the episode in the coming days.

The download file is available in HD version and weighs slightly more than a gigabyte. Last year the finale episode of the series set a new piracy record with 1.5 million downloads in just eight hours. The downloads even broke the swarm record, with some 258,131 users reported to be sharing a single torrent of the finale season. Some 181,075 users shared a complete copy of the particular torrent.

The latest report suggests the Game of Thrones piracy many not increase further due to a number of legal alternatives. Meanwhile, HBO has taken steps to make it difficult to find the latest episodes on some of the popular torrent sites.

In May, HBO sent out thousands of copyright infringement warnings to pirates, while requesting the torrent sites to remove the Game of Thrones.

The Game of Thrones finale episodes are usually the most viewed in a season. Soon after the official broadcast of the first episode of season 6, more than 350,000 people had shared the copy, indicating the highest number ever in 2016. The TV series was the most pirated show of 2015 for the fourth consecutive year running.