Pirates plunder Game of Thrones
Over a billion illegal downloads and streams of HBO’s hit show easily surpass legal viewers
HBO’s Game of Thrones isn’t just popular with the network’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 that 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 premiere 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 steams, at 187.4 million.
And such dissonance wasn’t only relegated to the season premiere.
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 premiere, 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.
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.
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.