The Force is not strong with "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" torrent pirates, but the Dark Side is strong with an even darker show, "Game of Thrones."
Where people were left high and dry trying to catch a pirated copy of the latest "Star Wars" flick on the Internet, HBO's "Game of Thrones" set another record as the most pirated TV show of 2015.
For the fourth straight year in a row, "Game of Thrones" continues to reign over all of the pirated shows on the Web's torrent websites. On the flip side, in the same week, the most downloaded movie is not "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" but "The Martian," followed by "The Revenant" and "The Hateful Eight."
In the world of torrent pirates, however, TV shows are bigger than movies. The fifth season finale of "Game of Thrones," in fact, broke records all around with over 14.4 million downloads of just that single episode alone via BitTorrent. In comparison, what is arguably the biggest movie of the year - again, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" - has yet to break out a clear copy in the underground black market swap meet of torrents.
HBO, of course, knows what's going down. When one "Game of Thrones" episode gets downloaded 2.2 million times around the world after just barely 12 hours of it being aired on TV, that's something you don't miss. Worse, when the first four episodes of the latest season gets leaked well before the season even starts, you definitely get up and do something about it.
And do something about it HBO has, but it isn't enough. There are just way too many pirates, torrents, seeders and leechers (torrent speak for people sharing illegal files) than there are watchdogs policing the Internet. As a result, by the time the first episode of the fifth season finally premiered, the four leaked episodes had already been downloaded 5 million times.
As a response, HBO tried airing episodes of "Game of Thrones" season 5 on the same date everywhere since one of the common complaints was having to wait weeks or even months after U.S. premieres to catch it on HBO in other parts of the world. (This being one of the draws of downloading a "GoT" torrent that's readily made available for download just shortly after an episode airs.)
HBO's rollout of its subscription streaming services (think NetFlix but for HBO shows only) HBO Go and HBO Now is also another initiative to help thwart piracy of its properties like "Game of Thrones." However, whatever impact those services have had, they're still overshadowed by piracy.
From the first year to this latest year where "Game of Thrones" has held the number one spot for the most downloaded TV show, pirates have also shown an increasing affinity for higher quality files. Nonetheless, the lower-quality 480p copies still prove more popular than the higher-quality 720p, 1080p and higher copies (though there are more of them being downloaded than previous years).
Aside from "Game of Thrones," a far second as the most downloaded TV show of 2015 is "The Walking Dead" with 6.9 downloads for one episode. "The Big Bang Theory," which garnered 4.4 million downloads for a single episode, is at third place. Joining them on the list of most pirated TV shows are "Arrow," "The Flash," "Mr. Robot," "Vikings," "Supergirl," "The Blacklist" and "Suits."
If recent trends are to be followed, it looks like "Game of Thrones" is about to have another smashing year of views both legal and pirated.