Jeremy Clarkson's Grand Tour is the 'most illegally downloaded program ever' as viewers avoid paying for Amazon Prime

Grand Tour, a reboot of the BBC's Top Gear program hosted on Amazon's subscription service Amazon Prime, is the most illegally downloaded program in history, Engadget reports.

Data from analysts at anti-piracy technology company Muso shows that the first three episodes were illegally downloaded 20.7 million times with 13.7% of that traffic coming from the UK.

Chris Elkins, Muso chief commercial officer, told The Guardian: "It is the most illegally downloaded program ever ... It is off the scale in terms of volume. It has overtaken every big show, including Game Of Thrones, for the totals across different platforms."

The numbers don't come as too much of a surprise given that its debut episode, which aired on November 18, broke a number of records: Grand Tour was the most watched premiere ever on Amazon Prime Video and became the top rated TV show or movie on IMDb, with an overall rating of 9.6, while getting a 4.9 out of 5 rating on Amazon and a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Incredibly, Amazon's second-best performing show could only muster a third of "The Grand Tour's" ratings, The Wrap reported.

The company also said it saw the second highest number of new Prime member sign-ups on the day of the show's debut - after Prime Day, its big annual sales holiday that draws tens of millions of shoppers to its site.

The show's popularity suggests that the reported $250 million (£199 million) Amazon paid for the show is paying off, but the company is losing millions in revenue from the illegal downloads. Figures from Muso show that it lost £3.2 million on the first episode alone.