THOUSANDS of Chinese viewers illegally downloaded the new season of “House of Cards” after streaming site Sohu failed to release the American political drama when Netflix rolled out all 13 episodes in late February.

    The piracy-tracking firm Excipio said China was the largest source of illicit downloads in the first 24 hours after the episodes hit torrent sites.

    Research firm GlobalWebIndex estimated that more than 20 million Chinese used virtual private network services to access Netflix, which is currently not available in China.

    On Chinese social networking site Sina Weibo, users have posted messages containing torrent sharing files, most of which were stored by Dropbox-like online file hosting services.(SD-Agencies)