Game of Thrones continues to shatter all the piracy records. Once again, the show has broken the record it set just last week, when “Kill The Boy” notched 2.2 million P2P downloads in 12 hours and 3.22 million over a 24-hour period. That record was only a couple of weeks old itself, and was set after people downloaded the first four episodes of Season 5 en masse after they leaked.

This past Sunday’s episode, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” reset the one day benchmark once again. According to Variety:

The sixth episode of “GoT” season five notched 3.5 million individual users on peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, according to piracy-tracking firm Excipio. The previous record was held by episode 5 of the current season of “Game of Thrones,” which reached 3.22 million in the 24-hour period after it hit piracy sites….

It’s worth noting that the piracy stats Excipio tracks are only for P2P file-sharing sites, so those exclude piracy-streaming sites. That means the number of illicit viewers is likely far higher than the 3.5 million registered so far.

Game of Thrones seems to be in a bit of a mid-season slump when it comes to week-to-week ratings, even though it still continues to win Sunday nights decisively. But online, it’s a different story, as users race to download episodes every week. (And the controversy surrounding this week’s episode probably didn’t help matters in that regard. All publicity is good publicity.)

Despite HBO pouring money into HBO Now, and airing every episode in a world wide simulcast, it seems like their efforts have been ineffective. After all, a simulcast doesn’t solve piracy problems if the people in those countries don’t get the exclusive pay channel (or the exclusive pay channel that is partner to HBO). As for HBO Now, it’s US only, so that’s not helping outside our borders. Inside them, some might suggest part of the reason HBO Now didn’t stem the tide was the network’s refusal to make it available to a much broader spectrum of viewers. Right now, you either have to have Cablevision or an Apple TV set box in order to access it. It should be pointed out that Apple TV set top boxes are not nearly as prevalent as Roku boxes. In some ways, that “walled garden” approach to releasing HBO Now has worked in HBO’s favor. Unlike other streaming services that HBO built their platform on, like MLB.tv and the WWE Network, HBO Now has been almost entirely glitch free, something MLB.tv can’t even say after a decade of running. But it does have a price, as the piracy numbers continue to rise.

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