Game of Thrones season 7 was pirated over a BILLION times
Game of Thrones has been showered in accolades of late. It’s appeared on numerous year-end best-of lists for 2017. It was the most talked-about show on Facebook and Twitter this year. Time to celebrate.
If only every accolade was welcome. TorrentFreak reports that, for the sixth year in a row, Game of Thrones was the most downloaded show on the popular torrent client BitTorrent. At its peak just following the season 7 finale, 400,000 people were actively sharing an episode using the service, and keep in mind that BitTorrent is just one of many ways to pirate the show.
Here’s the list of the most pirated shows of the year on BitTorrent:
- Game of Thrones
- The Walking Dead
- The Flash
- The Big Bang Theory
- Rick and Morty
- Prison Break
- Sherlock
- Vikings
- Suits
- Arrow
Shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead have been mainstays on this list, and held onto the spots they had last year. Meanwhile, shows like Prison Break, Rick and Morty and Sherlock made new appearances.
HBO dealt with a bevy of problems during the run of Game of Thrones season 7. At one point, the company was hacked and had the synopses of episodes leaked online, while other episodes were leaked mistakenly by HBO affiliates.
On the other hand, season 7 saw huge viewership, with the finale being the most-watched episode of the show ever. So all’s well that ends well for everybody, pirate and landlubber alike.
Helen Sloan – HBO
UPDATE: Citing data from tech company Muso, Express is now reporting that episodes of Game of Thrones season 7 have been, as of this writing, illegally downloaded a total of 1,029,787,668. Dear god in heaven, that’s a big number.
Per the Muso report, “Within the first 72 hours of broadcast, the Season seven premiere was downloaded and streamed over 90 million times. This was eclipsed by the season finale which accumulated more than 120 million downloads and streams (in 72 hours).”
"Game of Thrones has become one of the biggest global entertainment phenomena of today and activity across piracy networks has been totally unprecedented."
Whether people are watching it legally or illegally, viewership is at “unprecedented” levels. Hooray?
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