It's not even 48 hours yet.
http://www.nerdist.com/2014/04/game-of-thrones-latest-episode-got-pirated-like-a-lot/GAME OF THRONES’ Latest Episode Got Pirated…Like, A LOT
Well, you’ve done it again, Game of Thrones: you broke the Internet. Or rather, the Internet’s busiest pirates broke it in the name of watching Sunday night’s episode by any means necessary. The most illegally downloaded show ever just beat its own record (set by its third season finale episode) thanks to “The Lion and The Rose,” which saw — Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert! — King Joffrey of House Brat-atheon (har har har) get himself good and murdered.
And, naturally, the dispatch of the most hated villain in television history (a lofty title but we feel comfortable handing it thusly) sent the web’s fiercest torrenters into a veritable feeding frenzy; we’re sure it’s because people just wanted to see how their fantasy fantasy league players were doing. Mere hours after the Purple Wedding took place, the episode was up online and being shared by 193,418 people. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “at the time of the record torrent, 145,594 had a complete copy and continued to upload, while 47,824 were still downloading the file.” BitTorrent, one of the most popular torrent platforms on the web, explained that this bested their current record-holder, the previous season of Game of Thrones‘ finale, which saw 171,572 users sharing the episode online and was downloaded approximately 1.5 million people.
Serious question, though: why did everyone insist on stealing it when HBO has already openly admitted to not caring about HBO Go password sharing? (When are you going to allow people subscription options for the Go platform as a standalone, HBO? Eh?) Surely connection to an HBO Go account must be fewer degrees than it takes to get to Kevin Bacon, right?