{"id":650039,"date":"2013-04-02T09:03:10","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T13:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webpronews.com\/?p=223351"},"modified":"2013-04-02T09:03:10","modified_gmt":"2013-04-02T13:03:10","slug":"game-of-thrones-premiere-broke-torrent-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/650039","title":{"rendered":"Game of Thrones Premiere Broke Torrent Records"},"content":{"rendered":"

Considering it was the most pirated show of 2012<\/a>, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the new season premiere of Game of Thrones<\/em> was downloaded quite a bit this weekend. <\/p>\n

But the sheer volume it pretty staggering – in fact, it broke records. <\/p>\n

TorrentFreak<\/a> has the numbers: In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent. That broke down to 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading. <\/p>\n

That’s a record in the world of BitTorrent tracking – the largest previous swarm belonging to a season premiere of Heroes<\/em> with 144,663 peers.<\/p>\n

If you take into account all of the torrents, TorrentFreak reports that estimates put the total number of Game of Thrones<\/em> season 3 premiere downloads at over a million. That’s a performance that even a hard-to-satisfy Lannister patriarch can be proud of. <\/p>\n

If you break down the numbers, the majority of sharers came from the United States (12.9%), barely topping the U.K., who took 11.5% of the pie. Australia came in third with 9,9% of the total downloaders. <\/p>\n

Of course, there are plenty of reasons that so many people decided to torrent the show. It has a huge following, first and foremost. HBO’s international release delays don’t help either. Plus, there’s a large contingent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) that simply don’t subscribe to HBO and can’t get HBO GO because they don’t have cable. Many of these people would pay for a standalone HBO streaming service, but HBO is yet to offer that outside a few Scandinavian countries (although the prospects have gotten a bit better<\/a> as of late). <\/p>\n

But according to one HBO exec, this piracy is more of a compliment and less of a problem<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cI probably shouldn\u2019t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,\u201d HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently told EW. \u201cThe demand is there. And it certainly didn\u2019t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.\u201d<\/p>\n