Game of Thrones’ season seven premiere attracted a record-breaking 90 million illegal views, according to piracy monitoring firm Muso.
Muso claims 77.9 million people watched the season seven premiere via illegal streaming portals, with 8.4 million using downloaded torrents via sites such as The Pirate Bay.
Downloads from private websites – members-only websites that require an invite before users can access the contents – made up 4.9 million downloads, according to Muso.
Geographically, the US appears to be the biggest offender, with 15 million illegal views, followed by the UK with 6.3 million.
Surprisingly, Australia – previously notorious for pirated content – was as far down as 11th in the statistics, with 2.2 million views.
TorrentFreak has reported that HBO’s anti-piracy partner IP Echelon started sending warnings targeted at torrenting pirates shortly after the new season launched last week.
“We have information leading us to believe that the IP address xx.xxx.xxx.xx was used to download or share Game of Thrones without authorisation,” the notification begins.
“HBO owns the copyright or exclusive rights to Game of Thrones, and the unauthorised download or distribution constitutes copyright infringement. Downloading unauthorised or unknown content is also a security risk for computers, devices, and networks.”
