The world's most pirated show is doing the rounds through illicit file-sharing channels again — and Australians are the worst offenders. Again.
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But this time a record number of fans also tuned in to watch the show on Foxtel legitimately.
Game of Thrones season six debuted on Monday at 11am in Australia exclusively on Foxtel and its streaming service, Foxtel Play.
Despite Foxtel discounting the price of its streaming service ahead of the premiere, plenty of Australians refused to fork out, instead taking to torrents to obtain a pirated copy of the first episode.
TorrentFreak, a specialist website which reports on digital copyright issues, reported more than a million people worldwide downloaded episode one, The Red Woman, through illicit channels within half a day of the episode premiering worldwide.
That doesn't quite beat last year's effort, however. It's estimated the season five premiere was torrented 1.5 million times in the first eight hours.
The worst offender was Australia, accounting for a whopping 12.5 per cent of all traffic for torrented copies of the episode. That's quite a feat when you consider the size of our population compared to other countries around the world.
The next worst offenders were India, with just short of 10 per cent of torrent traffic; the US at 8.5 per cent and the UK at just under 7 per cent. However, TorrentFreak notes the results are skewed due to time differences, with Australian pirates jumping on board in the late morning on a public holiday (elsewhere in the world the show aired in the middle of the night).
With the piracy numbers down on last year, more Australian GoT fans did the right thing and watched legitimately.
Foxtel's official figures show 727,000 viewers tuned in to watch the season six premiere, including the 11am simulcast and subsequent repeats. That's 31 per cent more viewers than tuned in for the season five premiere. However the figure does not include streaming on Foxtel Play and through the Foxtel Go app, meaning the actual viewer numbers may be much higher.
"This marks the most watched series premiere in Australian subscription television history," a Foxtel spokesperson said.
HBO, the studio behind the popular series, stepped up its anti-piracy efforts this year. It didn't release any preview copies to reviewers — although US President Barack Obama was allowed a private screening — and the first episode premiered simultaneously in 170 countries.
Yet the internet was already flush with rumours of a leak of episode one before its official airing, with some pointing the finger at a Canadian streaming service. The file quickly disappeared; but once the show had officially aired, it was only a short time before illicit copies were circulating again.
Pirates are also getting better quality video files. Long gone are the days when infringing copyright involved someone filming a cinema screen.
"An interesting trend among pirates is a move from standard definition (480p) to high-definition (720p and 1080p) video," Torrentfreak said.
"A few years ago roughly 10 per cent downloaded HD copies, which are larger in size, but today this is getting close to 50 per cent."
The piracy figures only refer to torrented downloads, not to other illicit ways of watching, such as downloading a file directly from a web page, or streaming the pirate episode live from a website.
Torrenting is form of peer-to-peer file-sharing where users upload and download parts of a file directly from each other, rather than from a web page, making it harder to track.
