Do pirated episodes put Game of Thrones at risk?

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]unday 12 April was the day of the much-anticipated premiere of the fifth season of Game of Thrones. Arriving at the top of charts since its first season, Game of Thrones is undeniably a very popular show. Maybe too popular? 

After months of waiting; binge-watching previous seasons; obsessing over the promo videos; watching fan theories on YouTube; and – for the most assiduous of us – reading the books, the big day was finally approaching.

But fans got surprising news 24 hours before the episode: pirates leaked not one, but four episodes of the new season. According to TorrentFreak, all four episodes were downloaded more than 100,000 times in just three hours.

After 18 hours, the first episode had been downloaded over a million times

Some fans received the news with great enthusiasm and binge-watched the first four pirated episodes online (come on, everybody does it). But some others –good citizens with impeccable morality – were angry that they now had to avoid spoilers on social media for the next month.

Others saw it as a “betrayal” and denounced the theft of intellectual property. I morally agree with this point of view, but I am weak and could not resist the temptation of watching all four episodes in a row.

I honestly regret doing this because, after months of patience, it was all over in a few hours. I now have to wait a whole month for Episode 5 to get out (unless someone leaks it before then!).

Photo: A cute cat shamelessly pirating Game of Thrones – Flickr/Clarissa Rossarola

I realised that the fun was actually to wait between one episode and another, to be anxious about cliffhangers and to predict what was coming up next. This intensity is Game of Thrones’ trademark and without all the mystery and the unsolved questions that haunt you for days, the show loses a lot of its value.

Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV show for three years in a row now. HBO’s CEO once said that even if he denounces piracy, he took it as a compliment and even affirmed that the piracy of Game of Thrones episodes is “better then an Emmy” when it comes to generating buzz.

In fact, pirates are free marketing for the show that gets talked about and ends up being watched by an increasing number of people. But following the recent events, HBO has strongly condemned the criminal acts and described itself as saddened by the incident.

In order to discourage pirates, HBO had decided to release Season 5 episodes simultaneously in every country. Normally, when an episode goes out in one country before another (depending on the time zone), some people illegally upload episodes onto the web for international viewers to see before their country’s official release time and date.

Unfortunately, the solution became the problem. Because the episodes were sent in advance to many international TV channels, more people had access to the episodes; someone working for one of these channels obviously shouldn’t have been trusted with such a task.

Another envisaged track is that one of the critics to whom the episodes were sent for review was responsible for the leak.

Journalists are particularly annoyed about this option: they are afraid the incident will discourage networks even further when it comes to sending journalists previews of shows

But could HBO have prevented this? There were certainly some additional measures that could have been taken in order to track down the pirates. One option would have been to put the on-screen code on different parts of the screen for each user. That way, even if the pirate blurred out the code, its location would have denounced the offender.

However, I feel like most people have been behaving when it comes to spoiling the show for other viewers. Most well known Game of Thrones YouTubers didn’t even mention the three other episodes.

In good news, the events didn’t affect HBO’s ratings. They actually saw an increase in legal downloading. So for all of you worried about your favourite show, I’m happy to report that it is not getting hurt by the piracy and that it has many brilliant – and deadly – days ahead of it.