Twitter Threatens To Ban Periscope Users Who Stream Game Of Thrones Season 5 Premier

by Gary Oldwood on 13 April 2015 · 2720 views

The official premier for the 5th season of the popular series "Game of Thrones" was a huge success; so big, that not even HBO could handle it, actually.

There are many reasons for this though. First of all, we all know how people love Game of Thrones. They love the series so much that they made it the most pirated series of last year (and probably this year's too). It was expected that so many people would want to watch it, and that's why HBO wanted to air the 5th season in more than 170 countries all over the globe simultaneously...

However, that was only the expected part of the situation. Hours before the 5th season's premier, several episodes from it were leaked online, with thousands of users rushing to download them; in fact, they were downloaded more than 1 million times in less than 24 hours. This was a great blow to HBO, but the fun doesn't stop there.

During the premier of the 5th season, there were dozens of users who streamed the much-anticipated episode via Twitter's popular livestreaming app Periscope. This app was dveloped by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein, and was bought by Twitter in March 2015 for $100 million. So, it's obvious that using an official app that belongs to Twitter in a way that is against its Terms of Service, is not going to end so good.

Case in point, it didn't take long for the popular social media service to respond to this action; Twitter showed its teeth by threatening to ban users who are reported to use Periscope as a way to stream GoT season 5 debut.

A Twitter spokesperson told Mumbrella:

Any violation of the terms of use are taken seriously. We work together with our community to ensure our content rules are respected. Report any content that violates our Community Guidelines.

Twitter's Terms of Service state:

In appropriate circumstances, Periscope will also terminate a user’s account if the user is determined to be a repeat infringer.

Therefore we can expect punishments if the same happens in the future- something that I doubt will be completely eliminated.

The quality of those streams is not all that great of course (which makes those SD leaked copies seem like heaven), and watching GoT by using Periscopeis is definitely a desperate move. Just take a look at the screenshots below and judge for yourself: