Though you'd be forgiven for thinking that literally every other person on the planet watches Games of Thrones, since those who do tune in rarely ever stop talking about it, it actually averaged only an incredibly respectable 30.6 million viewers per episode during this past seven-episode long season. And while that is a phenomenal number, especially on a freakin' premium channel in the era of cable cutting, it turns out that figure could've been about 140 million views per episode higher, at least if everyone watching it had paid for the platform they were viewing it on.
That's according to online content protection company Muso, who broke down illicit streams, torrents and direct downloads of the program, to estimate that this past season had racked up 1,029,787,668 illegal views as of September 3.
"Game of Thrones has become one of the biggest global entertainment phenomena of today and activity across piracy networks has been totally unprecedented," Muso CEO Andy Chatterly told Business Insider. "It's no secret that HBO has been plagued by security breaches throughout the latest season, which has seen some episodes leak before broadcast and added to unlicensed activity."
Furthermore, most of these illegal watches, which you may or may not have contributed to, came in the form of streaming (85 percent). Coming in a very distant second was torrents (nine percent) and bringing up the rear were direct downloads, with less than six percent of non-paying viewers going that route.
As for the most pirated episode? It was not the finale, which only drew 143 million freeloaders, but was rather the second-to-last episode, which racked up 184 million.
This would certainly help to explain how everybody everywhere you go seems to know what's going on in this show.
