Game Of Thrones Leak: First Few Episodes Of Season 5 Downloaded 7 Million Times Before Official HBO Debut

The most anticipated season debut of Game Of Thrones Season 5 on Sunday may not be very appealing anymore to be seen on TV as it said to be downloaded 7 million times worldwide from February 5 through April 6 this year, anti-piracy firm Irdeto said on Friday as reported by CNBC.

The piracy is said to have toppled HBO's strategic plan to simultaneously broadcast the first episode across 170 countries on Sunday evening Eastern time.

The anti-piracy firm further said that the first episodes appeared on several BitTorrent sites since Saturday and since then was downloaded a million times worldwide in the first 24 hours.

The Register UK cited reports from Variety stating that 'dodgy' copies of the medieval-themed series got almost 800,000 downloads overnight since it was posted online per statistics from Excipio, another anti-piracy monitoring site.

Screenshots of top countries who have the most downloads have been shown in Torrents Freak with the United Kingdom leading the pack, followed by the United States, India Canada and France.

Completing the top ten, the site also shows Greece, The Netherlands, Australia, Brazil and the Philippines to have joined the downloading craze.

Sources of the pirated copies are not yet tracked down. However, sources believed that the piracy act can only be done by those authorized members of the press who possessed the first DVD copies before the show's debut.

There were also speculations that there were hacks in the Sunday Times but sources did not strongly support this idea.

Last year, CEO Jeff Bewkes of Warner Bros said that online piracy is a positive sign that the show has achieved high audience engagement and that the company is not concerned at all with the pirated copies.

However, lately, Irdeto said that companies are starting to get more concerned with the norm and is starting to consider how to make money from it.

"It's often said that piracy is good marketing, but the mindset is shifting toward offering a compelling legal alternative like HBO Now to start converting pirates into paying customers," sRory O'Connor, vice president, services, at Irdeto said.