A Lannister always pays his debts, but does he pay for HBO?
Probably not, and there’s a good chance you know someone who also pirated the Game of Thrones season seven premiere. According to MUSO, the “world’s largest database of metadata on real-time behavior across the piracy market,” the episode has reportedly been torrented more than 90 million times.
[The premiere] was streamed 77.9 million times, torrented on public trackers 8.3 million times, directly downloaded 4.9 million times, and torrented from private trackers 500,000 times, Muso says. Most illegal views came from the United States (15.1 million), followed by the U.K. (6.2 million), Germany (4.9 million), India (4.3 million), with Indonesia (4.3 million) rounding out the top five. (Via)
That’s on top of the record-breaking 16 million people who watched the episode legally. “There is no denying that these figures are huge, so they’re likely to raise more than a few eyebrows in the mainstream industry,” MUSO co-founder Andy Chatterley said, “but it’s in line with the sort of scale we see across piracy sites and should be looked at objectively. What we’re seeing here isn’t just P2P torrent downloads but unauthorized streams and every type of piracy around the premiere. This is the total audience picture.”
HBO is already coming after anyone who pirated the episode, with Torrent Freak reporting, “Soon after the first episode of the new season appeared online Sunday evening, the company’s anti-piracy partner IP Echelon started sending warnings targeted at torrenting pirates.” A cease-and-desist letter is not the “priceless gift” you want (especially with six episodes to go).
(Via Business Insider)
