If you thought having annoying book readers telling you spoilers was bad, wait til actual show spoilers get revealed. Hours before the premiere, the first four episodes of Season 5 of Game of Thrones were leaked online. The videos were first uploaded on the private torrent tracker IPT on Saturday afternoon, but quickly spread like burning wildfire in Blackwater Bay. By Saturday night, the files had made their way to big public sites including The Pirate Bay, RARBG and KickassTorrents. The highly anticipated episodes were downloaded over 100,000 times in the first three hours.
The copy of the leaked videos appears to be a press screener and are 480p quality with a watermark blurred out. The leaks spawned from the hysteria over Season 5, which already have spectacular reviews. The first four episodes were awarded a score of 91 out of 100 based on 23 reviews on Metacritic.
This isn’t really that surprising considering that GoT is the most pirated show on TV. The anticipation is at such a furious level for GoT, that even the trailer for the Season 5 was leaked online before its official release in January 2015.
Like the four previous seasons, there are only ten episodes in Season 5 of Game of Thrones, so this is an extremely heartbreaking news for HBO. The cable company purposely set the launch of their online standalone streaming service to coincide with the Season 5 premiere.
Does HBO say, “Fuck you,” to the pirates by releasing the entire season all at once, a la Netflix? Or do they keep to the scheduled course and risk people canceling their service to watch the free pirated version online?
So tread lightly on Twitter for the next month, and definitely don’t search “#GameOfThrones” because I’m sure assclowns will be sharing the best spoilers online.