Game of Thrones tops hearts and–piracy charts!

You might have come across rave reviews for Game of Thrones on the Internet, but apart from the laurels and fan following, it also gets a huge number of illegal downloads. Its piracy is reaching new heights, which is not much surprising given its immense popularity.

The show’s season eight premiere was accessed 55 million times in the first 24 hours illegally. The split up was something like this:

1. Bootleg streams (76.6 percent)
2. Downloads (12.2 percent)
3. Public torrents (10.8 percent)
4. Private torrents (0.5 percent)

Among countries, India is at the top of the pirated views, with 10 million views followed by China at 5 million views. HBO Now is inaccessible outside of the US barring India to view the show on grounds of cost or lack of services. In the case of China, only a censored version of GoT was aired which must have prompted the audience to see the same version that the world gets.

Even the US was present, with a whopping 4 million views suggesting that there were too many who simply don’t care for paying for premium TV services.

We’d have to see the total number of piracy hits that piles up by the end of the season.