HBO’s Game of Thrones has continued to be one of the most pirated TV shows of all time, and as such, it wasn’t surprising to learn that the long-awaited Season 8 premiere was heavily pirated as well. According to the data from analytics firm MUSO, they found that the premiere of Season 8 was pirated a whopping 55 million times.
Breaking those numbers down, MUSO found that 76.6% of the illegal views came from unofficial streams. Web downloads accounted for 12.2%, public torrents for 10.8%, and private torrents for 0.5%. They also found that the majority of piracy came from India, which it was speculated that this could be because of the difficulty of legally accessing the show in the country.
Next up was China, where the country accounted for 5 million pirated views. This was also speculated to be because of the fact that the show is censored, suggesting that many viewers just wanted to watch it like the rest of the world does. Of course, this does not mean that the US got away with no piracy.
In fact, MUSO found that the US was third in piracy where despite it being legally and easily accessible, the US accounted for about 4 million pirated views. That being said, it will be interesting to see how many times Season 8 will be pirated, especially during the final episode which will also mark the end of the series.
Filed in . Read more about Entertainment, Game Of Thrones, Hbo, Legal and Piracy. Source: theverge