India’s Game of Thrones fandom sees no end. In fact, the GoT season 8 arrived on our shores stronger than the winter they’ve been promising for the last seven seasons.
But... here’s an interesting, but rather predictable fact. We are actually the country that views Game of Thrones illegally the most.
On April 14th, the first episode of the season was pirated 55 million times, of which India’s share was a whopping 10 million as per data shared by analytics firm MUSO, and reported by Digit India.
That makes India’s percentage of illegal viewing of Game of Thrones to be 18 percent of the global number, with China coming second with 5 million illegal views followed by the US who came in third with four million pirated views.
India can stream GoT at the same time as the international premier on Hotstar premium but doesn’t enjoy access to HBO Go or HBO now .
What makes matters difficult are easily vincible VPN’s that provide access to torrents and illegal streaming which makes it tough to prevent the illegal downloading and piracy.
Instagram also recently revealed that India is the top Asian country that talks the most about Game of Thrones with Mumbai being the top city having the maximum number of conversations about the show. Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai are second, third, fourth and fifth to follow the show.
But what’s surprising is that despite the show having such a wide audience in the US and HBO Go and HBO Now being officially available in the country,there were still around 4 million illegal views originating from there.
Guess even the Game of Thrones obsession couldn’t get people to pay HBO to watch the show. HBO official numbers across all platforms showed that the season premiere for GoT season 8 was viewed 17. 4 million times within the first 24 hours of the release. However the numbers look less now compared to its illegal viewership which is almost thrice as much.
(With inputs from Digit India)
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