Yup, 'Game of Thrones' Season 8 premiere piracy numbers are huge

When it comes to Game of Thrones and piracy -- or, really, any popular piece of media and piracy -- the question isn't so much "if" as it is "how many." In Game of Thrones case, how many is... a lot.

New stats from the online piracy data firm Muso suggest that the April 14 season premiere of HBO's hit series was downloaded or watched illegally more than 54 million times in the 24 hours after it aired. For context, Nielsen's tracking puts the total number of legal viewers on Sunday night at 17.4 million.

(The Nielsen data accounts for those who tuned in for the episode live at 9:00 p.m. ET or either of the two reruns that followed, as well as those who streamed it over HBO's on demand services. Nielsen's data doesn't account for repeat viewings, however.)

Muso's report also notes that illegal viewers spent time preparing for the final Game of Thrones episodes even before the Season 8 premiere aired. For the first 11 days of April, all seven seasons of the show were among the "Top 25" most pirated TV shows globally. The period between Feb. 2019 and April 11 saw piracy activity around Game of Thrones more than double.

Looking at the activity by region, the U.S.A. isn't the biggest offender. India ranks as the biggest source of this Game of Thrones piracy, accounting for almost 9.5 million of the 54 million total. China comes in next at number two, with roughly 5.2 million. The U.S.A. is in third place here, accounting for almost 4 million illegal looks at the premiere.

Muso estimate that the bulk of the illicit behavior centered on unlicensed streams of the episode, 76.6 percent of the total. Web downloads accounted for just 12.2 percent and public torrents -- from websites like The Pirate Bay -- were responsible for another 10.8 percent. Private bittorrent websites are responsible for the smallest share of illegal downloads, just 0.5 percent.

A separate report from TorrentFreak notes that on April 15, the morning after the Season 8 premiere, more than 120,000 BitTorrent users were actively sharing the episode. (BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that depends on multiple users continuing to share, or "seeding," files after they've been downloaded.)

Notably, TF's report points out that while the Season 8 premiere showed up early for some DirecTV Now users, the initial pirated versions of the episode actually came from Amazon. They started showing up on pirate website within minutes of the episode going live.

The TF report also corroborates Muso's data about torrent downloads being less popular than streaming alternatives.

In absolute numbers, there are fewer people sharing the episodes via BitTorrent than a few years ago. The absolute record dates back to 2015, when over a quarter million people were simultaneously sharing a single file. This is in part because the piracy ecosystem has evolved. 

Unlicensed streaming is responsible for the lion's share of the illegal viewing audience these days. Likely because it's more difficult to track and, for viewers, is less risky (under current laws in the U.S., at least) than file-sharing -- which often requires in-kind sharing and leaves the file recipient with tangible evidence of their misdeed.