14 DAY TRIAL // “Game of Thrones” is setting new records left and right. This time around, the popular show’s latest episode has become the first online file to be shared by more than 200,000 people at the same time.
The HBO hit show modeled after George R. R. Martin’s popular book series isn’t at its first record and it looks like it won’t be at its last one either.
According to TorrentFreak, a day after the latest episode made its way online, more than 1.5 million people downloaded it from a series of trackers. While most of these pirates may be more than willing to watch the show on HBO when it airs or even on HBO Go, the fact that the pay per view TV has imposed delays in broadcasting “Game of Thrones” episodes and that HBO Go isn’t available all over the world has pushed people to torrent sites.
The show’s producers didn’t seem particularly upset with the issue and saw this as a sort of compliment in the past, but HBO is on a witch hunt to bring down fans and sites that keep on spreading the show without permission. Given the latest numbers, HBO has its work cut out for itself.
Even so, the demand for the show is growing year by year and with each passing episode, and it looks like “Game of Thrones” has the chance to become the most downloaded show for yet another year in 2014, despite the fact that it has a lot less episodes than other series currently on air.
This week, however, was the first time that the 200,000 simultaneous sharer milestone was reached and this happened just a few hours after the first torrent of the show appeared online. TorrentFreak cites data from the Demonii tracker, which recorded that 207,054 people were sharing that single torrent at the same time. Nearly 163,500 were sharing the complete copy, while over 43,500 people were still busy downloading.
The previous record was of 193,000 people and it was reached a couple of weeks ago, when (spoiler alert!) the show’s most hated character met his death, much to everyone’s happiness.
Of course, now, torrent sites are flooded with multiple versions of this week’s episode, and adding up all the numbers will probably result in much higher numbers. “Game of Thrones” has aroused the interest of pirates from all over the world, and previous reports indicated high demand in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and The Netherlands.