Game of Thrones Broke Record in File-Sharing

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Game of Thrones Broke Record in File-Sharing

Game of Thrones, created by Home Box Office, first aired two years ago and since then quickly gathered an incredible number of fans across the globe. Recently it turned out the HBO’s TV series broke another record: the third season premier collected 6.7 million viewers on BitTorrent.
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Indeed, it took just a few hours for the first episode of season 3 to leak online, with people going completely berserk about it – this was quite an expected reaction, as Game of Thrones claimed the “most pirated show” title back in 2012.

It seems that the wait was too intense, with the first episode being downloaded 1 million times and accounting for an absolutely impressive number of seeders – 163,088. This makes it a new record on BitTorrent’s networks. If you take a look over the location of those seeds, you’ll see that Game of Thrones is particularly popular in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Such numbers would scare any Hollywood studio to hell, but HBO’s staff isn’t worried. HBO programming president sees it as a compliment of sorts – it shows the demand, and certainly doesn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. In the meanwhile, an Australian pay-per-view TV company Foxtel has recently announced that it will soon air episodes of 40 popular TV series, including Game of Thrones and Mad Men, within mere hours of their premieres in the United States. The company believes that the strategy is quite simple – you deliver the best TV to the audience once it becomes available. This is why closing the window between American or British premiere dates and Australian ones is Foxtel’s priority.

So, Game of Thrones will also be aired just 2 hours after the United States, while Mad Men is expected to have a 4 hour delay. Another popular series, True Blood, is going to be aired in the same day as the United States. The hope is that the strategy will make people choose a legal way of watching their favourite TV shows. Actually, this strategy proved to be quite successful – for instance, this season of The Walking Dead aired only 33 hours after US transmission and has attracted larger audiences to Foxtel.

George R. R. Martin, the author of the books “Game of Thrones”, said that it is the most pirated TV show throughout the globe, and a lot of it is coming from Australia. The reason is that the show delayed for six months there – of course, people won’t wait for that long when they can download it illegally and enjoy right now.

Game of Thrones
walking dead
boardwalk empire
all good...

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China Shut Down Huge Movie Hub
Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

China’s authorities have shut down siluhd.com – one of the country’s most famous websites. The portal has over 130 employees, 1.4 million registered users, and over a decade of servicing the public with high-quality pirated films. Siluhd.com used to be amongst China’s favorites, but recently the website’s CEO and some of the directors were detained, and the portal was closed down.

The announcement was made through a local news portal known as Sina – the report said that Siluhd used to offer hundreds of thousands of HD films (in Blu-Ray format), TV series, music tracks and video games. The suggestion was that the portal was targeted by the Chinese authorities because it charged its members with about $8 per month. Still, it is yet unclear how much money the portal generated along the years.

China celebrates World Intellectual Property Day in the end of April, and this year the event came with a big, fat prize – according to statements of the country’s officials, the CEO and 7 of the portal’s directors were detained on suspicion of copyright violation. In addition, 30 out of the 139 employees could also be detained, because they allegedly uploaded copyrighted works.

Media reports confirm that police found in the CEO’s house over 190 1-TB hard disks with more than 10,000 pieces of films and TV series. Apart from Siluhd, a number of other popular websites, most of which offered free content streaming and downloading services, were closed down as well, according to Sina. Nevertheless, their predicament might appear temporary, because one of them, for example, simply resumed its business the next day after the popular event.

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“Game of Thrones” Extremely Popular Online Again
Added: Tuesday, June 25th, 2013

Once season 3 of Game of Thrones was officially released, the very next day its first episode has become the most searched for and downloaded video on file-sharing services. Not long after, the series set a new record with the same TV show.



Movie experts, talking about Game of Thrones, use the term “epic” and now it also applies to the success of the TV series on BitTorrent. According to reports, mere minutes after Season 3, Episode 10 of Game of Thrones was officially broadcast in the United States, over 170,000 people were already sharing it at the same time. The statistics say that Australia became the leader in Game of Thrones downloads. The pirates from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom are also very active in sharing the series.

For a while now, Game of Thrones is known for setting records – for instance, back in 2012 it claimed the “most pirated show” title and a couple months ago, the series hit 1m downloads in less than one day after the debut of the season. Up to that time P2P network had never witnessed such a large swarm – over 160,000 peers that had been sharing simultaneously. It turned out that the United States totaled the largest number of downloads, followed by the United Kingdom and Australia.