14 DAY TRIAL // The premiere of Game of Thrones' third season was a highly anticipated event. Fans have been waiting for this for almost a year and the break has been long enough that the fan base grew since the last time a Game of Thrones episode aired, thanks to DVD releases and other means of watching the show.
So it's no surprise that, from the looks of it, the first episode of season three, Valar Dohaeris – "all men must serve," debuted to record ratings, more people watched it on HBO than the last episode of season two, Valar Morghulis – "all men must die," the previous record holder.
Seeing how Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show of 2012, a title that the show's creators, actors and HBO have reluctantly accepted, it should be no surprise either that the first episode was a hit on BitTorrent as well.
At its peak, one copy of the episode had 160,000 people either sharing it or downloading it. Many more downloaded the other versions. TorrentFreak estimates that one million people have grabbed the first episode via BitTorrent in the first day of its release.
Even now, the most popular copy, the smaller SD version, has almost 70,000 seeders and more than 10,000 leechers.
A 720p copy has about 30,000 seeders and leechers in total, a repacked 720p copy has some 23,500 more downloaders. Several other versions have thousands of downloaders.
HBO has promised to do something to curb piracy this year, something that should actually work, i.e. airing the show faster and in more places legally. It's too early to know whether this has worked, though judging by the download numbers alone, you could say that it hasn't.
But considering that more people than ever have watched the show legally as well, it's hard to quantify whether an increase in the number of pirates means that the show is more pirated, relatively speaking.