Game Of Thrones Season 5 Episodes Leaked, Xbox Live Members Get Season 5 Premier For Free
The first 4 episodes of the massive success "Game of Thrones" have been leaked online, just a few hours before season's 5 premier (12/04), and rumours are surrounding the reason of this leak.
Leak Details and Stats
According to TorrentFreak, those leaked episodes originate from review copies sent to the Press and somehow were released online. They were downloaded more than 100,000 times in a time frame of only 3 hours, and more than 1,000,000 times in 18 hours! Obviously, two things are amazing here: the speed with which the news spread, allowing thousands of users find out about it, plus the actual number of users who actually downloaded the episodes (it's astonishing that so many people want to get their hands on unreleased episodes early).
Here are the locations with the most users downloading the leaked episodes so far, according to TorrentFreak:
| # | Country | % | City | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| torrentfreak.com | ||||
| 1 | United Kingdom | 9.8% | London | 3.3% |
| 2 | United States | 9.1% | Athens | 2.4% |
| 3 | India | 7.8% | Lisbon | 1.9% |
| 4 | Canada | 5.4% | Stockholm | 1.8% |
| 5 | France | 4.2% | Bucharest | 1.7% |
| 6 | Greece | 3.3% | Madrid | 1.7% |
| 7 | The Netherlands | 3.1% | Mumbai | 1.4% |
| 8 | Australia | 3.1% | Dubai | 1.3% |
| 9 | Brazil | 3.0% | New Delhi | 1.3% |
| 10 | Philippines | 3.0% | Toronto | 1.1% |
As you can see, UK users are at the top of this chart, followed by US users. 3rd in the list is India, followed by Canada and France.
What's interesting however is that the leaked episodes are in Standard Quality (SD) and not in High Quality (HD), a fact that "disappointed" a lot of users who had high hopes for HD leaks (once you go HD you can't go SD), thus giving up on their downloads and deciding to wait for an official release instead.
This situation is rather ironic, since HBO, in a big effort to reduce piracy for the highly popular series, premiered Season 5 yesterday night simultaneously in over 170 countries. HBO desperately wants to decrease the number or users who pirate GoT, as it was last year's most pirated series. Well, unfortunately for them, it's not going as expected.
Xbox Live Members Can Stream the Premier for Free
Truly, Xbox 360 and Xbox One users with an Xbox Live subscription can stream Episode 1 of the 5th season for free, until April 16th. Apart from the episode, there will be more content available to those members, such as trailers, on-set tours and bloopers. The rest of you will have to get an HBO subscription, such as HBO Now with Apple and Cablevision.
I don't think it's a very wise move from users to download and watch those 4 episodes yet. Yes, it might be a lot of fun watching them over the next few days, but considering that there is only one new episode per week, you'd have to wait a month before watching a new one... it's just not worth it.
