Illegal downloads of ‘Game of Thrones’ season 7 hit one billion

The seventh season of fantasy series “Game of Thrones” has been illegally pirated more than one billion times, according to Muso, a piracy monitoring company.

“Piracy eclipsed legal viewings”, the company said. Official figures for legal channels averaged 31 million viewers per episode, which would mean nearly 220 million across the total seven episodes.

Within the first 72 hours of broadcast, the season 7 premiere was downloaded and streamed over 90 million times.

The season finale was downloaded and streamed more than 120 million times.

Episode 6 received 29% more instances of piracy consumption than the season finale by Sunday, September 3.

The episode had been aired four days early by mistake, according to reports. HBO Spain appeared to have accidentally released the episode, which was available to subscribers for one hour before being removed.

Muso explained that streaming activity accounted for 85% of the total piracy, whereas torrents and private trackers made up less than 10%.

In August, TBO reported that four people were arrested in relation to the leak of an unaired episode of “Game of Thrones”, according to Star India, a fully owned subsidiary of 21st Century Fox.

Andy Chatterley, co-founder and CEO of Muso, said: “‘Game of Thrones’ has become one of the biggest global entertainment phenomena of today and activity across piracy networks has been totally unprecedented.”