This one’s for those who watch TV shows and especially those who are fans of Game of Thrones. It’s not necessary to tell, but still on 31st of march 1st episode of Game of Thrones season 3 was aired. It was like a fest for the fans, and the episode seems to have broken many records. Finally, the fans were satisfied after the surprising end of the second season last year.
The show comes in 1 hour long episodes on HBO. According to the stats from HBO itself, and worldwide ratings show that about 6.5 million viewers were watching the show at the same time, breaking the record of last year’s premier. Although it also broke another record which seems to be related to piracy. Apparently it was a record breaking numbers of simultaneous peers in the swarm looking to download the episode through torrents. Torrentfreak’s bittorrent news says that the file was downloaded about a million times and that too in less than a day, even though it’s completely illegal.
Its a known fact that sharing and downloading these shows are completely illegal, but still its better than paying for premium cable service to watch that episode through HBO. It shows that torrents have spread so widely that people trust on the uploaders to get them their shows as soon as they are released and that too in multiple qualities. One can also guess, why torrents are used so much because countries outside US have to wait for an episode to be aired in their country. So why wait, when they can get their hands on the episode so easily.
When talked to HBO about this piracy, they studio says that they take that as a compliment. It actually shows how much popularity the show has gained among the common mass. About that delay-airing of episodes in other countries than the US, the studio says that they solved this problem using WorldWide premiers. The effort has not reduced piracy, although increased its profit and viewership worldwide.
The news also tells us that the highest amount of pirate downloads was seen in the US, then the UK and then Australia. But the company is not going to take this piracy issue lightly and are gonna take major steps to stop the theft of their copyrighted material. Yet it seems highly unlikely that anything like that can happen in the near future as technology develops exponentially.
As HBO’s statement shows – “Unfortunately, with such success also comes theft. Many anti-piracy tactics have been effective and we will continue to improve those efforts so we can continue to deliver high quality, acclaimed programming to our customers.”
Share what you think about this whole system or show’s popularity. We are here to listen.
Find us at www.digitfreak.com or www.facebook.com/digitfreak
