'Game of Thrones' Sets Piracy World Record

It’s been three months since the season 4 finale of Game of Thrones and the effects of the show are still present. According to a new report from Semetric, a firm that tracks online activity around TV shows, movies, video games and other forms of media, “Game of Thrones” is by far the most popular target for online piracy: At their peak, episodes of the HBO series accounted for more than half of all TV shows pirated on file-sharing networks, and more than all music downloads combined.

The finale itself saw 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours after it aired, and an additional 2 million downloads since then. Even now, three months after the finale aired, demand for “Game of Thrones” is still high on the black market, Semetric says, with the show receiving about 300,000 downloads daily.

“Game of Thrones” is the king of pirate networks, but it’s also an example of what media companies can learn from such black-market networks—if they look past the fact that people are stealing their stuff, Gregory Mead, chief executive and co-founder of Semetric, says: “Rather than focusing on the political intrigue of piracy, we’re using it as a metric of pure demand, because price doesn't matter. The only barrier of entry for people is setting up a BitTorrent client.”