One of the most pirated TV shows in the history of television – Game of Thrones’ episodes have always left fans scavenging the World Wide Web for the latest offerings from the highly acclaimed HBO original series.
The fifth season of the critically acclaimed Westeros Saga got off on the wrong foot with the initial four episodes made available even before the international premiere through rogue sites thanks to a leak from the press previews. HBO though has been denying that it is unruffled with the pirating of its money spinning television offereing, it has been trying every trick in the book to stop this menace and curtail future instances.
HBO has to bring its A-game to the fore if it has to put an end to the piracy of the series and hasten the process because the plague continues to aggregate, with its latest episode Kill the Boy having broken the show’s own record (Season four finale which saw 1.5mn downloads) for the most illegally downloaded title. Not a trophy the original content creators would like to show-off on their fireplace mantles. Pundits predict that this act of pirate insanity was primarily driven by the fact that downloaders, who had dried up their bank of episodes, were geared up to pounce on the newest addition online.
Variety.com reports that Excipio, a piracy-tracking firm has stated that Sunday night’s episode Kill the Boy has already been downloaded more than 2.2 million times within 12 hours. That comes to about an average of 200,000 downloads an hour, which is an insane number, leading the honchos at HBO wanting to release Khaleesi’s dragons to burn each illegal downloader to ashes.
The show is legally available in most of the English speaking nations but still the popularity of the show has seen it being downloaded in regions like US, UK and Australia. HBO now is taking progressive steps to stop similar leaks from happening again like: decreasing the number of hard copy screeners that go out to press for episode reviews; but the pirates know their way out of this and this won’t hinder fanboys from going after the episodes following their live airing.