Co-executive producer George R.R. Martin arrives for the season premiere of HBO's "Game of Thrones" in San Francisco, California March 23, 2015. (Photo : REUTERS/Robert Galbraith)
In less than 24 hours before the official release of the first episode of the highly anticipated fifth season of HBO's "Games of Thrones," advanced pirated copies has circulated throughout different torrent communities.
According to Torrent Freak, the leak is comprised of the first four episode for the series' fifth season. The leak was first spotted on private torrent tracker IPT. However, due to the show's popularity, it has rapidly spread to other public torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents.
Based on the leaked videos quality, it is most likely to be a screener copy sent to various press outlets for review purposes.
HBO, the series' home network, has been devising various strategies over the past few years in order to counter the excessive piracy. To date, "Game of Thrones" has been consistently ranked as the most pirated TV-series of all time over the past few years.
In its attempt to suppress piracy, HBO decided to simultaneously release the premier episode of the series' fifth season in 170 countries. Unfortunately, internet pirates seem to be one step ahead of HBO and they have proved this by releasing the first four episode of the season.
After the news spread on the torrent community, an unprecedented amount of torrent traffic was solely devoted into downloading and uploading bootleg copies of the series' leaked episodes. Three hours after the release, all four episodes manage to rack up more than 100,000 download hits and analysts predict that it will climb to more than a million hits once it reaches mainstream attention.
The leaked episodes were all in 480p standard definition, according to Engadet. Although piracy might strike a heavy blow when it comes to revenue, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes saw this on a different perspective when he said that piracy of "Game of Thrones" episodes has cause the series to garner more attention compared winning an Emmy award.
