In the least surprising news of 2015, Game of Thrones has once again taken the crown for “Most Pirated Show” of the year. This is the fourth year in a row the show has taken the “honor” of this title, one it has held since 2012 and Season 2.
Unlike some other years, where there has been some question as to Game of Thrones’ ability to hold onto the title, what with The Walking Dead and other popular fare attempting to rack up numbers, the show opened up the lead so early in the year that it was a shoo-in for this year’s title by the first week of April, based on just the downloads of the previous four seasons, at 7 million downloads in 90 days. And that was *before* someone got a hold of the screener DVDs that HBO sends out to critics prior to the show airing and uploaded them to to the internet. TorrentFreak, which makes it its business to keep track of these sorts of dubious honors, says that over half of the downloads for the show came in the week after that upload, which is no surprise to anyone.
TorrentFreak, working from BitTorrent’s numbers, says the show was estimated to be downloaded 14.4 million times. (And that’s not counting other well-known sites like Pirate Bay.) To put that in perspective, Game of Thrones beat the competition in 2014 with 8.1 million downloads via BitTorrent. As one can imagine, this year was a no-contest landslide. The Walking Dead’s numbers for second place are less than half that, at 6.9 million.
The article goes on to note that despite the release of HBONow, which was an effort to both enter the streaming conversation and complete with Netflix, as well as make inroads with those cord-cutters who make up the bulk of those who illegally download shows like Game of Thrones, piracy showed zero signs of slowing in 2015. In fact, not only did numbers rise, but in many cases, including that of Game of Thrones, they dwarf the ratings numbers of those who actually watch it legally. HBO estimated that 8.1 million tuned into Thrones this season, which is a little more than half of the piracy estimate. (And again, we have to remember that TorrentFreak is only working with the numbers from one streaming site. Pirate Bay is just as huge as BitTorrent, and if one imagines that they have numbers of similar magnitude, that would mean that Game of Thrones could very well be looking at illegal download numbers in the 30 million range, which was the original estimate of the download numbers around the time of the screener leak.)
Of course, there was the fact that HBONow was only made available through AppleTV during the Season 5 run, and did not come to the far more popular platforms like Roku until this past summer. So perhaps, with HBO changing to distributing its screeners the 21st century way with online access only available to chosen reviewers, instead of the old school DVD-in-the-mail method, and the wider distribution of HBONow, 2016 could finally be the year they turn the corner. Until then, let us all hail the Most Pirated Show of 2015.