In keeping with our nation’s convict history, Australia was once again the country with the most illegal downloads of the latest episode of “Game of Thrones”. The first episode of the show’s sixth season was only aired at lunch time on Monday, yet more than a million people have pirated the episode in less than 24 hours.
TorrentFreak has estimated that Australia represented 12.5% of all torrent downloads for the episode, followed by India with 9.7%, the US with 8.5%, and the UK with 6.9%.
Despite the mammoth amount of downloads, it still wasn’t enough to eclipse Australia’s world record, which was 1.5 million in its first 12 hours, achieved on last season’s finale.
The one million downloads comes despite legal means of watching the show through Foxtel. However, the pay TV operator locked all digital rights down too, meaning iTunes, Quickflix and other digital providers can’t make the show available until the series is completely finished.
Foxtel is hoping to curb piracy of “GoT” by offering a discounted Foxtel Play subscription; however, if episode one is of any indication, it’s not exactly working.
Foxtel will be fighting the “Game of Thrones” battle on multiple fronts, with not only pirates a concern, but also HBO’s Now streaming service. While Now isn’t officially available in Australia, it’s not hard to use a DNS or VPN service to get around it.
Although, the cost of $US14.99 plus $2-3 per month for a workaround leaves you with roughly only a $5 discount compared to Foxtel Play.
The next episode of “Game of Thrones” airs on Monday.