'Game of Thrones' Season 5 Premiere Torrents Make Show Lose $44 Million in Revenue

Internet pirating will continue to fuel legality debates for as long as the internet exists. The two seem to go hand-in-hand. The latest victim to torrenting right now is Game of Thrones. After Entertainment Weekly reached out to TorrentFreak, we found out GoT received massive download numbers. The first episode was downloaded more than 13 million times and that resulted in HBO losing out on $44 million in revenue.

The biggest perpetrators came from the United States, France, Brazil, China, Russia, the UK, India, Canada, Australia and Spain. Ten percent of that 13 million came from right here in the United States while Australia had a staggering 32% of those downloads.

Over the year, HBO made a few key moves to stop this but in the end it wasn't enough. Despite all their efforts tormenters racked up record numbers.

The first move HBO to avoid pirating was to have the show debut in all 170 countries at once. They hoped this would ensure that those who got the show later wouldn't have a means to watch it after American viewers post it online.

Another step HBO took to stop the pirating was by having HBO Go become a subscription-based service. With the service HBO offers a free 30-day trial to users where they could cancel at any time. This gave the opportunity to binge the entire series really quick and then move on but that still didn't stop the torrenters. They surely underestimated how cheap people are.

The torrenting was actually so bad for more people torrented the show than saw it live. The debut had a record high of 8 million and it still didn't beat out all the illegal downloading. What seems to have kicked off the mass torrenting was a leaking of the DVD screener sent to critics. For now it's unknown who posted those episodes.