Game of Thrones Smashes Piracy Records With “The Wars To Come”

For every step HBO takes toward preventing piracy of Game of Thrones, it feels like the pirates force it two steps back.

TorrentFreak has released the numbers this morning for the number of people who downloaded the Season 5 opener “The Wars To Come,” and the results are staggering.

[The first episode] was downloaded over 13 million times, which is significantly more than last year. 

Thirteen. Million. That’s equivalent to the population of Ecuador. Let’s put this in perspective. Game of Thrones’ previous record, which was held by the Season 4 finale “The Children,” broke records for the most pirated episode of anything ever with a number half that large–7.5 million copies. We knew Game of Thrones was on track to be the Most Pirated Show of 2015 when TorrentFreak reported that, in the run up to Season 5, the first four seasons had already been downloaded 7 million times.

Interestingly, the data for the post broadcast torrent also shows that most downloaders grabbed high quality copies. The 720p version was most popular with 43.5 percent of post broadcast downloads, followed by the 480p and 1080p copies with 35.1% and 31.4 percent respectively. In part, this tendency towards high quality content can be explained by the fact that many fans of HD content skipped the lower quality pre-release leak.

That means that nearly half of the 13 million that downloaded the first episode didn’t actually download the first four-episode screener leak, which was at a far lower quality than 720p. The screener leak almost certainly made people more aware that they could go to Pirate Bay and find the episodes, but when they got there after the premiere aired, they downloaded the already-aired copy. And then there’s this:

With the four leaked episodes and the “A Day in the Life” documentary included, the company found that there were 32 million downloads across 18 million IP-addresses during the first week.

… 32 million. That’s roughly the entire population of Canada (Perhaps that’s why Canada is sending notices to those who illegally downloaded?). We can’t put that in perspective with previous piracy numbers, because that kind of number in that short amount of time is simply beyond anything the show has ever seen.

When broken down by location, the US had the most downloads. Interestingly, Australia, at number 9, actually had the most downloads per capita, with 32% of viewers watching illegally. As TorrentFreak points out, in terms of revenue, HBO cannot be happy.

“In the US alone, nearly one million consumers downloaded Episode 1, which translates to $44 million in unmonetized demand potential if each of these viewers subscribed to HBO Now for the 3-month duration of GoT Season 5.”

Needless to say, the record this set isn’t about to be broken by anything anytime soon–unless someone releases something on the order of a high quality print of Age of Ultron to the internet on April 30th. Certainly, no TV show will generate such numbers. We can confidently predict that Game of Thrones will take the Most Pirated title this year in a walk.

• Published on 04/22/2015 at 9:30 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT