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Grand Tour 'Most Illegally Downloaded TV Show In History' (theguardian.com)
Jeremy Clarkson's new motoring show has become the most illegally downloaded television programme in history, figures suggest. Amazon paid a reported $160 million for three series of The Grand Tour, which stars former Top Gear presenters Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, after Clarkson was sacked by the BBC in March 2015. From a report on The Guardian: But figures from Muso, data analysts of the piracy market, suggest unprecedented numbers of people are avoiding paying $90 a year to sign up for Amazon's online streaming service, Amazon Prime, and instead downloading the show illegally. The data, shared with the Mail on Sunday, suggests the first episode was downloaded illegally 7.9m times, the second 6.4m times and the third 4.6m times. British viewers made up the largest percentage (13.7%) of the total number of illegal downloads.
There is no way for them to know how many times something was downloaded or pirated. This is more of the same crap the RIAA/MPAA used in the US to try to convince politicians they were losing insane amounts of money. These figures are completely fictional and this article is a joke.
AFAIK Prime Video is only available in United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Austria. Leaving much of the world without a way to watch the new show. I don't consider it an excuse to pirate it, but i can certainly understand why so many would download it illegally when they have no legal means of acquiring it. Prime Video used to be in the nordic countries but was close in 2014 for unknown reasons (probably not that popular). I hope Amazon can see a potential in this widespread piracy and start offering it through legal means to more people. It worked for HBO with GOT in the nordic countries when they started offering their content through "HBO Nordic".