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Apparently Just About Everyone Pirated The Season 8 'Game Of Thrones' Premiere

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This article is more than 4 years old.

Credit: HBO

55 million.

This number could describe the population of Shanghai, the world's largest city, if you doubled it and then added 3 million more people. It could also describe the distance in light years between planet Earth and the recently imaged black hole.Or it could refer to the rise of mammals on earth when, approximately 55 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum time period when global warming events, possibly sparked by a comet hitting earth, drastically changed life on this planet.

But for the purposes of this post, (nearly) 55 million refers to the number of the Game of Thrones season 8 premiere was pirated during its first 24 hours. It's a very big number. A lot of people pirated the show, despite it having massive ratings that broke HBO records.

Still, the Season 7 premiere was pirated 90 million times in its first three days. But this is still a faster rate, and three times the number of legal viewings which clocked in at 17.4 million.

The biggest offenders are India, with 9.5 million instances, China with 5.2 million instances and the US with 4 million. Of these three, Indian viewers have the best excuse: HBO is not available in India, and there is no legal means of watching Season 8 at this time. In China, the version aired was a censored version that cut out all the naughty bits, giving Chinese viewers (already fairly accustomed to piracy) a good enough reason to pirate the premiere. Here in the U.S. of A. we have no such excuses.

Read my review of the season 8 premiere here.

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