So season five of Game of Thrones is currently hitting the airwaves. And despite massive efforts from all companies concerned – be it Foxtel dropping their prices, and HBO trying to meet things halfway by staging a global simulcast, it turns out people are still turning to piracy in numbers that cannot be ignored.
In what continues as the growing trend of younger people turning their back on traditional TV delivery models like cable and pay-TV, Variety reports that not only is Australia a huge contributor to the global number of GoT downloads, but that the overall number of people doing it is now shattering records for the show.
We already knew that the numbers were going to be big when the epic four episode leak of the start of the season drew in the kind of numbers that could put cracks in The Wall. But the official piracy ratings for the series premiere post-broadcast are positively staggering.
In the 12 hours – TWELVE HOURS – after the show went to air (again, simulcast around the world), post-broadcast copies of S05E01 were recorded to have been downloaded a whopping 2.2million times. This by far and away eclipses the previous single day piracy record of 1.86million, set by Game of Thrones‘ season 4 premiere last year.
Even further, of those 2.2million downloads, 167,301 were tracked from Australia. And it’s worth noting that that number does not, in any way, include those who downloaded it here from behind a VPN. There’s no telling how much higher that overall number could have been if it weren’t for the pre-season leak.
It sounds like a broken record at this stage, but Foxtel’s model, for a myriad of reasons, simply doesn’t resonate with young consumers – the rapid uptake of Netflix to the point where it actually affected internet speeds nationwide should serve as blatant evidence of that.
In the US, HBO’s HBO Now service remains in its infancy, but represents at least a step in the smarter direction.
But for those of us out here – and WE KNOW HOW TO GET A VPN, EVERYONE WHO WILL COMMENT ABOUT IT, JUST HUMOUR US – it’s entirely likely things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better. The Government’s new anti-piracy laws are forecast to cost ISPs $130,825 per year. If you think for a second at least some of that cost won’t be passed on to end consumers, you’ve got another thing coming.
via Variety.
