Alexey Shishkin: Pirate popularity

Alexey Shishkin Frame from the official trailer "Game of Thrones" / HBO HBO

The premiere of the eighth season of “Game of Thrones” broke the rating records of the channel, Time reports with reference to HBO. In the USA, 17.4 million people watched the first episode of the eighth season. Thus, the series squeezed the last episode of the seventh season from the upper lines, which at the time of the release was watched by 16.9 million people. At the same time, the number of series views in the United States will still increase significantly, as it continues to be available to viewing in the HBO Go online service and in the HBO Now application. On average, each episode of the seventh season was eventually watched by 32.8 million inhabitants of the United States.

In his report, HBO also notes the growth of the number of spectators who preferred to watch the series not on the television channel, but in the HBO Go and HBO NOW streaming services. Compared to the last episode of the seventh season of the online audience, it grew by 50 percent, and compared to the premiere of the seventh season-twice. The premiere of the eighth season took place in more than 150 countries, reports The Japan Times, but HBO admits that the channel is not able to collect data so quickly from so many markets, so the total number of viewers of the legal copies of the episode around the world is unknown.

Frame from the official trailer "Game of Thrones" / HBO

The number of views of illegal copies is even more difficult to determine, but with confidence we can say that the series after year after year is one of the upper lines in the lists of the most downloaded torrents. However, HBO is not too worried about this. In April 2014, the head of the Board of Directors of Time Warner (a maternal company owning HBO) Jeff Bucket in an interview with Forbes explained : “According to our experience, all this leads to a greater penetration, to a greater number of paid subscriptions, to a healthier situation for HBO and less depending on the need to rely on paid advertising ... I think you are right that you are right that you are right that you are right that you are right that you are right. "Game of Thrones" most often in the world becomes an object of piracy. Well, you know, this is better than getting an Emmy Award. ”

The director of the fourth and fifth episode of the second season of the series David Petrarke had to make excuses in connection with the charges of piracy support. Speaking at the literary festival in the Australian Perty, he said that he did not attach importance to illegal views of the series, since they create a “cultural hype” and a large number of comments from the audience. His comments quickly scattered over the Internet, and, soon after his performance with Sydney Morning Herald, he hastened to assure readers that he was “100 percent, entirely and completely against people to download something illegally. No one benefits from illegal download. ”

Similar thoughts were expressed in 2013 by HBO director Michael Lombardo. “I probably should not say this, but this is a kind of compliment,” he said to Entertainment Weekly. - So there is a demand. And this obviously did not have a negative effect on DVD sales. ” In the same interview, he noted that being a streaming service, they firmly oppose piracy, but do not “send the police of the Game of Thrones” when this happens.

Michael Lombardo / SCPR.ORG

A quick search during the writing of the article demonstrated that the Russian AmediaTeka service, which owns the rights to show the series in Russia, is not too worried about piracy and the Russian service. Any person who is quite competent technically in order to go around the locks of Roskomnadzor, can quickly find a torrent with the first series of the eighth season, albeit in not the highest quality. Perhaps it was such a relatively soft approach to piracy that led to the fact that the service received so many new subscribers that at the time of the release of the series of its server, they could not cope with the load. The premiere of the eighth season was scheduled for four in the morning, but until 4.40 users experienced serious problems with paying for subscription and downloading video.

“We five times increased the number of equipment in our service, but even so it could not cope with the desire of the fans of the series to start watching the episode first. The load from 4 to 5 in the morning was more than two times higher than the peak indicators for the entire exit time of the previous season. This is the absolute record of the service for the entire time of its existence. ... We thank all our subscribers for patience and operational feedback, which we received this night. And, of course, we are already working to ensure that there are no such failures in the future, ”the company says .

Figures of the heroes of the series "Games of Thrones" / Pixabay.com

However, the Chinese spectators of the Game of Thrones had even more reasons for discontent. In China, exclusive rights to distribute the series is owned by the technical giant Tencent. The series shown by the Tencent service lasted 48 minutes, and not 54, as in the rest of the world. The fact is that for a show in China, six minutes of action were cut out of the episode. Frank scenes, scenes with naturalistic cruelty in the frame and scenes with rough obscene vocabulary were subjected to the editing. “They disinfected the episode and removed the entire action and joke. As if I had paid for watching family drama, ”Time citing a complaint of one of the users of the Chinese social network Weibo as saying.