Audiences of Game Of Thrones do not take the task of stealing their sweet, sweet, HBO juice lightly. Failing to provide local, cost effective access to the show—through an avenue that does not rhyme with Shmupert Shmurdoch—only gives [some] of us down under a single choice. Taking Our Really Really Engaging Nightly Television into our own hands.
Entertainment Weekly reports that such an effort was unusually bountiful for the season premiere of Game of Thrones – an occasion that also saw four episodes leak en masse. Piracy of “The Wars To Come” was taken to by a massive 13 million people (and counting), a figure worth $44 million in revenue losses for HBO, according to an estimate. 32 million total downloads for Game of Thrones episodes in the week of April 12 has also been estimated.
The biggest chunk of downloads for “The Wars To Come” came from the United States—10%—a relatively surprising fact considering HBO’s recent push to make their service more accessible and cost effective through HBO Now, a service that isn’t doing Australians any favours by threatening to cut geo-dodging users loose.
Australia (duh), France, Brazil, China, Russia, UK, India, Canada, and Spain were also signalled by Torrent Freak as the key seeders and leechers of S05E01. While illegal downloads of the show accounted for 8% of the total viewership of the US, in Australia – a whopping 32% of Game of Thrones viewers accessed the episodes illegally.
Not sure if proud, horrified, or both.
Despite illegal downloads remaining rampant in relation to Game of Thrones, Entertainment Weekly also reports that legal viewers of Game of Thrones in the US reached a record 8 million viewers.
This is what you get for making really fucking great television, HBO. You’ve done this to yourselves.
