AMC streams Breaking Bad

AMC has made the latest episode of its crime drama Breaking Bad available to stream online for free in the US following record ratings – a first for the US cablenet.

Breaking Bad

The episode was the highest-rated show on US cable when it aired Sunday night, attracting 5.9 million viewers, a series high for Breaking Bad as the show approaches its climax.

The figure is almost four times the amount of people who tuned in to the series’ first episode and is well up on ratings for the previous episode of the show’s fifth season, which attracted just under three million viewers when its aired in September last year.

The surge in viewers has been widely credited to the availability of previous Breaking Bad seasons via video-on-demand service Netflix in the US, allowing fans to catch up when they choose.

However, the latest episode is not yet available on Netflix in the US and AMC’s decision to host the episode on its website is an attempt to prevent the episode being pirated on the web – with questionable results.

Yet the cablenet has said the move is a one-time-only event and will not be happening with future episodes in the show’s fifth and final season.

The series stars Bryan Cranston as a high school chemistry teacher who begins producing drugs having been diagnosed with cancer.

Meanwhile, Netflix has exclusive subscription VoD rights to the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad in the UK and Ireland.

The service made the most recent episode available online to subscribers under 12 hours after the episode had aired in the US, trying to reduce the number of people viewing the episode via illegal streams.

Apart from the first and second seasons of the show, which were picked up by Channel 5 and Fox in the UK, Netflix has been the only place to view the subsequent seasons of Breaking Bad legally in the UK.

“Netflix has been instrumental in making Breaking Bad the success that it is, particularly in the UK and Ireland, where it has built an audience and become a huge phenomenon,” said the drama’s creator Vince Gilligan last month.