The season finale of Game of Thrones managed to drum up a new “piracy record” with more than 170,000 people sharing the episode simultaneously. In one day more than 1 million people downloaded a copy of the show’s final episode. Yet despite all this piracy HBO wants to keep the show “exclusive” and refuses to bring it to NetFlix and other online streaming services anytime soon, surely this attempt to monopolize exclusivity is what has driven such large piracy in the first place?
The season finale was uploaded within a few minutes of the episode finishing on HBO. Within a few hours of this the number had rapidly climbed to multiple thousands and Game of Thrones is once again crowned as the most pirated TV show of the year thanks to HBOs refusal to distribute it via other mediums.
These “illegal downloaders” that have been watching HBO’s Game of Throwns come from all over the world but Australians were particularly over represented. TorrentFreak predicts this will only get worse as Australia’s cable provider is choosing to decrease availability of cable TV shows from next year. HBO’s programming president Michael Lombardo doesn’t see piracy as a problem, in fact he sees it as a compliment, and he believes it does not negatively impact on DVD sales. This could be part of the reason why HBO refused NetFlix’s offer and wanted to retain exclusivity regardless of how much this encouraged piracy.
Image courtesy of TheDrum.com
