HBO’s most popular TV series Game of Thrones returned with seventh (7th) season on July 16. Di-hard fans of this highly popular series had to wait for 13 months to watch their most loved serial again on their television sets. And those who could not watch the first episode of the show are now searching for torrents of the Game of Thrones Season 7 fresh episode on internet. The premiere on Sunday broke previous records by drawing in 16 million viewers. ‘Dragonstone’ opened the Seventh season of GOT with a bang, laying the foundations for the wars in coming episodes. The HBO website also crashed on Sunday evening and many fans complained that they missed the first half of the episode.
GoT is the most pirated show in US television history. The show broke all previous piracy records in 2016, thanks to the long run of the show, its huge popularity, and HBO being a premium add-on channel for most subscribers on cable. It is expected that Game of Thrones Season 7 will do pretty well in 2017 in terms of torrent downloads. A recent survey conducted in the UK suggested that around 3.7 million Britons are planning to watch the leaked Game of Thrones Season 7 illegally by downloading, streaming or borrowing a torrent copy of the show (GOT S7E) Game of Thrones Season 7. About 33 percent of the people who will watch the show won’t pay for it.
According to Torrent Freak report, more than 130,000 people actively shared the torrents of first episode of Game of Thrones on July 17. Understandably, HBO won’t be happy to hear the news.
It is not so difficult to understand why people outside US are now searching torrents of Game of Thrones Season 7 with terms like “game of thrones season 7 torrents, GOT S7 torrents, game of thrones season 7 episode 1 download, game of thrones season 7 episode 2 leaked, torrents of game of thrones season 7 all episodes”, etc.
Watching Game of Thrones Season 7 Fresh Episodes in the UK, Australia and India
In India, Hotstar is the official streaming partner of HBO and it will airs Games of Thrones Season 7 at 7.30 am on Monday. This means users don’t need to search for torrents of Game of Thrones Season 7 on Google, Bing or Yahoo. It is also being claimed that the show will be available for viewers ‘hours before torrents’. Makers of the show and HBO are taking enough measures to ensure that seventh season of GOT doesn’t fall victim to online piracy.
According to some reports, HBO is using anti-piracy company IP Echelon to monitor torrents of Game of Thrones Season 7 All episodes on internet. IP Echelon is reported to have been tracking the IP addresses busy in downloading the torrents of Game of Thrones Season 7 episodes. While peer-to-peer sharing of GOT S7 doesn’t rely on any one server, its disadvantage is that IP addresses downloading a torrent are publicly available. IP Echelon has now started sending warning notices to ISPs with a request to pass the message that downloading torrents of Game of Thrones is illegal. The alert sent to ISPs includes the IP-address of the users who downloaded the torrent of Season 7 of Game of Thrones.
HBO’s DMCA notification states that they have details of IP address xx.xxx.xxx.xx that was used to download or share Game of Thrones without authorization. If further states that unauthorized download or distribution of Game of Thrones is a crime and it also presents a security risk for devices, computers, and networks. The warning alerts are also aimed at educating the people about harms of using downloading content from torrent sites.
In 2016, the publisher HBO had attempted to crack down on pirates of Game of Thrones by joining hands with IP Echelon. It is not yet clear how much success did HBO get in its endeavor last year, but it is clear that there is a long way for HBO to go to stop online piracy and leak of GOT Episodes on internet.
HBO will also need to ensure that servers of its online partners don’t go offline once the show is live on TV. In Australia, Foxtel’s services collapsed when Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 1 (GOTS7E1) was being aired. The same thing happened with Hotstar in India, which suffered a technical problem and displayed the message “We’re having a temporary playback issue. We’re working on it and will be back very soon!.” Some users got the message “Something unexpected has occurred. We’re working on it. Please try again in sometime.” Thankfully, servers of Sky Atlantic in the UK did fine and were able to manage viewers without any major problem. Hopefully, this will refrain some viewers from searching torrents of Game of Thrones (GOT) season 7 episodes.
Game of Thrones S7E2 will be aired on July 23 on HBO in the US, and on July 24 on Sky Atlantic in the UK.
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