No Show Promoted Online Piracy As Much As Game Of Thrones, Most Pirated Show In History

Back in 2010, almost 10 years ago, everyone I knew in college had pirated something at least once in their life.

Among my group of nerds, it was PC games. Other friends were pirating movies, music, or in some (lame) cases, the TV show 'Friends'.

The thing is, torrents were so popular at the time because it was the only way we could watch our favourite movies and shows once they'd left theatres and cable TV. After all, who was going to spend money on a physical DVD collection?

In time, we finally graduated to online streaming proper. We got things like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar. Surely, now that we had easier access to the content we wanted, piracy would decrease a little? Apparently not.

Take Game of Thrones for instance, recently crowned effectively the most popular show of all time. Over 17.4 million people tuned in to watch it on various licensed streams. And yet, it was pirated millions of times in just the first day, so what gives?

To understand, we need to go back to 2011, when the show first debuted. Thanks to the fairly large number of people that had already read the George RR Martin series of books, it got a pretty good debut showing. However, most people that had never heard of the show before kept hearing from their friends that it was really good. Of course, if they didn't have HBO on cable, they had no way of checking it out themselves. And so, the torrenting began.

Eventually, Game of Thrones became so popular in its first year, it rocketed to the top of the most-torrented list, according to TorrentFreak, behind only 'Dexter'. It clocked 3.4 million illegal downloads that year. And people loved the show so much, it seems many of them, prepared to torrent Season 2 in advance the next year as well, hitting the top spot with 3 million downloads per episode.

That number kept jumping through all the subsequent seasons, with GoT retaining the most-downloaded title for the next eight years, aside from 2017. And that dip wasn't because the show lost popularity either, but rather the proliferation of illegal streams gaining popularity alongside torrents.

All of this came to a head this year, when 54 million people illegally downloaded the season 8 premiere, in just 24 hours. And the thing is, while people are the direct perpetrators of this, HBO can only blame themselves.

BitTorrent download numbers for the Season 8 premiere - TorrentFreak

For the first four seasons, the main way to watch Game of Thrones remained the HBO cable channel. In a lot of places, that meant paying extra to receive the "premium channel" usually not included in the common base package. It was only in 2015 that the company launched its HBO Now streaming service, and that wasn't exactly cheap either.

The thing is, had HBO been willing to share the rights with other platforms like Netflix, it probably would have been pirated less. After all, the main reason people still torrent shows these days is because they're already paying for a streaming subscription, and they're not willing to pay for one more for a single show.

If GoT was available on a few other platforms too however, HBO could have mitigated the illegal downloads stealing their revenue, and would have made some income from royalties on the side too.