HBO says 'down Periscope' after Game of Thrones livestreamed on Twitter's app

Game of Thrones enjoyed an impressive season 5 premiere on Sunday, with nearly 8 million viewers tuning into HBO to watch it. Unfortunately for the broadcaster, millions more pirated the show -- as is the case every year -- and the situation wasn’t helped by the online leak of the first four episodes that came in advance of the new season’s launch.

HBO is obviously furious about that leak, which it confirms originated from an as-yet unidentified reviewer, but it’s equally unhappy with Twitter, whose Periscope app was apparently employed by some users to livestream episodes of the show on Sunday.

HBO has sent take-down notices to Periscope, but feels Twitter shouldn’t have to be told about copyright infringement before acting to stop it.

"In general, we feel developers should have tools which proactively prevent mass copyright infringement from occurring on their apps and not be solely reliant upon notifications", HBO said in a statement.

Google has tools to automatically spot when someone tries to upload copyrighted content to YouTube and it’s clear HBO would like to see something similar being used on Periscope.

That said, when millions of people are torrenting high definition episodes of the show, Periscope users live streaming it are the last of HBO’s worries.