Piracy numbers for Game of Thrones Season 7 totaled more than 1 billion views 

Bad Pirate Euron quite happily telling Tyrion that Season 7 of “Game of Thrones” had more than 1 billion pirated views (not really, but that would be funny).

is, by a wide margin, the most popular show in the history of television. It’s shown in 170 countries around the world and has entrenched itself in popular culture, and its viewing numbers seem to climb every season — an anomaly in television.

 is also the world’s most-pirated show (hey, not everyone can borrow an HBO Go login every Sunday) and 

, a market tracking company, recently reported that season 7 piracy numbers totaled more than 1 billion as of September 3 — the highest piracy numbers ever recorded for the show.

Viewers per episode via legal channels averaged 31 million,

found, but the numbers of illegal downloads “show that piracy eclipsed legal viewings. While this season was the most watched legally, the unprecedented popularity of the show has also seen fans across the world take to unlicensed channels to stream and download episodes in absolutely staggering numbers.”

Unlicensed streaming was the favorite medium, accounting for 85 percent of pirated viewings, with torrents and direct downloads making up the rest of the numbers:

also offered an episode-by-episode breakdown of the pirated viewing figures:

As for the exact total, as of September 3, the figure stood at 1,029,787,668.

“Game of Thrones has become one of the biggest global entertainment phenomena of today and activity across piracy networks has been totally unprecedented,” said Andy Chatterley, co-founder and CEO of

. “In addition to the scale of piracy when it comes to popular shows, these numbers demonstrate that unlicensed streaming can be a far more significant type of piracy than torrent downloads.”

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Its super anecdotal, but I know 3 different people at work who are watching the show for the first time now.

It’s a shame I can’t have hbo in my country. Can only watch it legally with one provider, and I have another for the next year and the last year, two year contract.

But I think these numbers say nothing. I download always 2 torrents and 1 Usenet, sometimes a download doesn’t have a previously or skips the intro.

I think many people download multiple downloads for if one download doesn’t work properly. And is Usenet counted here? And do you count 1 download = 1 person or multiple persons?

I personally hope hbo wil come back in my country or make a online subscription for got alone. Or a contract with netflix. That’s something I have.

I feel like a real sucker, paying exorbitant amounts for HBO every month when all that’s worth watching is GoT. I should cancel, primarily to stop getting gouged, but also so I can use the line (as one disgruntled customer posted online):

S2 and S3 remain the weakest for me. E7 of S3 is the worst episode in the entire show. The only truly filler episode.

Both seasons were too slow for my taste. Stannis’ storyline in S3 is complete filler. Bran’s storyline was filler for the most part. Sam’s as well.

Hopefully D&D give it the ending it deserves in season 8.

No more “Beyond the Wall” nonsense. More amazing writing like the Tyrion Cersei conversation. More epic battles grounded in emotion/character investment like “Spoils of War”.

Season 7 was a showcase of D&D at their pinnacle and at their worst. Although the good FAR outweighs the bad, the bad unfortunately was the entire basis of their big climax, which puts a damper on the whole season.

Hopefully Season 8 will be consistently at their pinnacle.

For me its still eason 5. But i actually think it was a great season aside from the Sand Snake scenes. Had they just not even focused on the sand snakes and kept the focus on Ellaria and made it a personal journey for her and dealing with Oberyn’s death and showing how that drived her to the dark place she was at the problems with the season would have been resolved in my view.

The last two seasons have really made me ok with the Sansa stuff since they turned the wedding scene into something that really shaped the character.

But I know a lot of people who had to slog through the first three seasons and were not fully hooked until the Red Wedding so def something there.

Lol. I know its unpopular but I actually loved Beyond the Wall. Everything regarding Dany in that episode was the show at its best in my view. A character making a difficult choice, the choice having horrible heartbreaking consequences yet at the same time defining who they are as a person was great stuff.

I recall strongly considering dropping all of my premium channels a year or so before GoT premiered. This of course has gotten me to keep HBO, but I’ve talked myself into keeping the others as well. Starz and Showtime have started some shows since that I have liked well enough (for a while). They’re not “can’t miss,” and I can probably watch them in cheaper ways, but I guess I’ve just stuck to convenience.

Mr Derp: I thought every episode from 5-10 that season was good. Episodes 1-4 were pretty underwhelming though.

It’s nice to see people comment that anything from S1-S3 wasn’t brilliantly perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved watching every minute of the series and have never wavered from thinking it’s the best. However, just like every show there are parts of episodes/seasons that are a little less fantastic. That includes the first three seasons as much as the next four. Some want to wax nostalgia about how they were so superior before moving beyond the books. Well, the books have a lot of drag in them as well and it’s gotten worse. There are fantastic parts and less fantastic. They’re far from perfect.

The benefit the first books and the early seasons had was building the world, characters, storylines and setting things in motion. Both mediums have to become a bit different in this story as everything ‘breaks down’ towards the climax. Some still want the scheming, backstabbing, twists and unexpected deaths this late in the story when we’re at a point where resolution is trying to be achieved for all of that stuff earlier. There were also many great characters involved in the early story that aren’t alive anymore. That’s a big thing.

I enjoyed “Beyond the Wall” for what it was, but I personally wouldn’t put it anywhere near my list of top GoT episodes.

I think there is such pressure to just get content out that so much trash gets written and there is a big bubble effect regarding people parroting others opinions.

Literally the same people writing how not enough people died this year were the same people talking about how the show was too nihilistic in season 4 and 5.

I feel like a real sucker, paying exorbitant amounts for HBO every month when all that’s worth watching is GoT. I should cancel, primarily to stop getting gouged, but also so I can use the line (as one disgruntled customer posted online):

You can subscribe to HBO Now for $15 a month and have access to every series HBO has to date as well as documentaries, movies, soft core porn, and sports specials. You can cancel at any time and sign up again whenever you want.

And there are other series as good or better that HBO has to offer other than GoT. The Wire, Deadwood, Sopranos, Curb, Six Feet Under, Boardwalk, to name a few.

I am just a sucker for Dany being the hero and Jon recognizing what she is all about.

Clob: Some still want the scheming, backstabbing, twists and unexpected deaths this late in the story when we’re at a point where resolution is trying to be achieved for all of that stuff earlier.

Yep.. This is exactly why the “fan service” complainers, in my opinion, are hypocrites. There is a pretty large and vocal population of GoT fans who constantly complain that there isn’t enough backstabbing and twists anymore. Therefore, if we start to get more of that since so many fans want it, couldn’t that be considered “fan service” too?

Rygar: You can subscribe to HBO Now for $15 a month and have access to every series HBO has to date as well as documentaries, movies, soft core porn, and sports specials.You can cancel at any time and sign up again whenever you want.

This is true. I don’t know if it’s this way for everyone, but I get Verizon Fios, and if you subscribe to HBO you get to watch pretty much every series that HBO has ever aired for free. In my opinion, it’s absolutely worth it, but everyone’s different. Just depends on how often one wishes to watch the programming they offer.

At a certain point, you run out of adjectives to describe how amazing these numbers are. I’m hard-pressed to think of when another show will ever approach this level of both sustained growth and intense worldwide popularity. It will be a long time before we see its like again, if ever.

That opinion is more popular than you might think. There’s no place on the Internet that will give you a perfect representative sample, but from what I’ve seen the overall average reception for the hour on websites like IMDB remains quite high. It would be fair to call it polarizing – it clearly inspired strong feelings on both sides. But polarizing implies that there are two poles, one of which is extremely positive. That’s where I reside, personally. I absolutely adored “Beyond the Wall”. I will vocally and unabashedly champion that episode forever, and I will continue to watch it and love it long after this show ends.

mau: E7 of S3 is the worst episode in the entire show. The only truly filler episode.

I’ll agree that a lot of it could be considered filler, so to speak, but I enjoy the character focus and that episode was full of the sort of scenes that Season 7 was sadly lacking or which were rushed or poorly written.

Most of the scenes – such as those between Jon and Ygritte, Robb and Talisa, Brienne and Jaime and so on – built solidly towards their eventual payoffs and the resultant emotional impact of them.

I would gladly watch that episode ahead of the utter trash that was Eastwatch, for example.

Plus, give me Tywin counselling Joffrey over almost every minute of Season 7 apart from the battle sequence in The Spoils of War.

Each to their own, I guess. But I wish we’d had anywhere near that level of “filler” to properly build some of the relationships, conflicts and payoffs in Season 7.

That scene with Joffrey and Tywin is classic.

“You are being counseled at this very moment”

King’s Landing has never been the same since Joff and Tywin died.

Overall Id say “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” was indeed a filler episode, but so many of the earlier GoT filler episodes had scenes with terrific dialogue.

One example that comes to mind is season 2, episode 3. That episode is probably considered one of the worst in GoT history, but it still has the great scene where Tyrion is talking to Littlefinger, Pycelle, and Varys about marrying off Myrcella.

Sansa and Margaery’s scene was a cringe to me. Shae and Tyrion arguing part 13. More of the same with Jon and Ygritte.

Robb and Talisa had their worst scene. “I love you. Do you understand? I love you” Cringe.

Except the last scene nothing interesting happened in the entire episode.

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