Game of Thrones’ Season 5 Episodes Leak To Piracy Sites

Just ahead of the premiere tonight comes news that, despite HBO having worked very hard to keep the Game of Thrones piracy numbers down for the coming season, their efforts have once again been undermined. All four of the episodes that were sent out to screeners cropped up on piracy sites last night, at just about 9pm EST. Looks like someone couldn’t handle that last 24 hours of waiting.

According to Variety:

The episodes appeared on torrent sites sometime between 9 and 10 p.m. ET Saturday. Through 7 a.m. Sunday, the leaked “Game of Thrones” eps had been downloaded by more than 550,000 individual clients worldwide, according to piracy-tracking firm Excipio. The pirated “GoT” episodes are legitimate copies, Excipio said; the source of the leak is unclear at this point.

This is a huge setback for HBO, which has set up an unprecedented simulcast in over 170 countries where the show airs (that’s basically all of them, sans the UK) in order to cut back on the day after piracy that comes from nearly everyone to both the east and west of the US having to wait a full 24 hours for the show to air at 9pm the day after in their countries. And of course, the network debuted HBO Now to increase the number of legal ways available to watch the show. Waiting to release the episode until only 24 hours before airtime (and over the weekend) also puts HBO at a disadvantage when dealing with the problem, since by this time tomorrow, we would expect piracy sites to be flooded with copies of the first episode anyway.

We’ll be keeping an eye on those piracy numbers throughout the season. Game of Thrones is already on track to smash last year’s record, having been illegally downloaded over 7 million times in the last three months alone.

• Published on 04/12/2015 at 9:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT