Within hours of its release, the first episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones recorded a million illegal downloads but it did not beat its record set by the last episode of Season 5.
Perhaps in the last couple of years, Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV series, according to Torrent Freak, a publication that covers file sharing and copyright. With 200,000 BitTorrent users sharing the episode the morning after it aired, the trend will probably continue. Close to 50 per cent of the illegally downloaded copies were reported to be in HD. The top countries to download the episode of Game of Thrones were Australia, India, the US and the UK. The UK was responsible for 6.9 per cent of the downloads, compared with 12.5 per cent coming from Australia.
Sunday night’s Game of Thrones premiere had barely finished airing before the internet was ablaze with people talking about the episode’s final scene. Recaps, explainers, reactions, reviews: everything you could possibly want to know about what the episode revealed—and virtually nothing about how it was revealed. Game Of Thrones has become perhaps the most furiously discussed show of its generation.
Meanwhile, the Game of Thrones premiere ratings are in and the results are almost as complex as the show itself. Sunday’s highly anticipated Season 6 return of the Emmy-winning fantasy drama delivered a big ratings record by a key modern metric while slipping for the first time among a more traditional measure.