Pirates seize Thrones
Season 7 finale captures more illegal viewers than legal ones
Game of Thrones isn’t just popular with HBO’s subscribers.
The show’s seventh season, which wrapped up on Aug. 27, was pirated 1.03 billion times as of Sept. 3, says a recent report by the anti-piracy analyst firm MUSO.
The firm broke down the 1.03 billion illegal views in two ways: by episode and by file format.
What’s most striking is the episode breakdown, because it suggests that many more people watched the blockbuster TV series illegally this year than those who paid to see it on HBO.
Those 1.03 billion illegal downloads and streams were spread out over seven episodes and a downloadable bundle containing the entire season.
The season 7 première made headlines for its record-breaking legal viewership of 16.1 million viewers who watched the show either live or later on HBO’s streaming platform, Variety reported. That number pales in comparison to its illegal downloads or streams, at 187.4 million.
And such dissonance wasn’t only relegated to the season première.
The season finale garnered similar headlines for being the “mostwatched episode ever,” said Entertainment Weekly, which reported it was watched 16.5 million times — breaking HBO’s rating records.
It was illegally streamed or downloaded 143.4 million times.
The piracy happened quickly. The season 7 première, for example, was illegally downloaded and streamed more than 90 million times within three days of airing. The finale, meanwhile, was pirated more than 120 million times in the same time period after its airing.
The second-most-pirated episode was the sixth. It was leaked after HBO Nordic accidentally aired the episode early in Spain, allowing pirates to steal the file and upload it to the internet, as the Daily Beast reported. Presumably, this made it more attractive to fans who wanted to know what happened before they were legally given the chance.
It was illegally streamed or downloaded 184.9 million times. The pirates viewed the show in a few different ways.
The most common — 84.7 per cent — was streaming it from a website that posted the illegal content. Meanwhile, 9.1 per cent of pirates downloaded it as a torrent file, a file broken into pieces and downloaded from many different servers at once. Another 0.6 per cent of the downloads came from private torrent servers and 5.6 per cent were traditional downloads.
“Game of Thrones has become one of the biggest global entertainment phenomena of today and activity across piracy networks has been totally unprecedented,” MUSO CEO Andy Chatterley said. “In addition to the scale of piracy when it comes to popular shows, these numbers demonstrate that unlicensed streaming can be a far more significant type of piracy than torrent downloads.”
The numbers hint at how widespread the piracy problem is for Hollywood. Though assessing the economic impact of piracy is difficult, there have been a few estimates in the past several years — many in the billions.
In 2010, the Directors Guild of America pegged the annual cost of global piracy to U.S. companies at $25 billion in lost sales. This translated into 375,000 jobs lost each year, the DGA said. In 2006, the Motion Picture Association of America commissioned a study that found film piracy cost the U.S. economy $20.5 billion.
HBO has not commented on the piracy numbers, but they would likely be somewhat concerning to a network that went to great lengths to avoid this very outcome.