The competition for the Iron Throne on the screen is paralleled - in the real world - by the epic struggle for supremacy in television production.
Eight
years after the first season premiered, the long-awaited winter has
finally come – Game
of Thrones’ final season is here. The television series created
by David Benioff and Daniel Brett Weiss from the books by George RR
Martin has built a rich and complex multi-thread plot-knot of epic
battles, of the living and the undead, of long owed-debts to be paid,
and of the culmination of clan stratagems to win the Iron Throne of
the Seven Kingdoms.
But
at the end of season seven in the autumn of 2017, it wasn’t the
clan warfare that had us cliffhanging, but the thought of the army of
undead white walkers and their zombie dragon bearing down on
Westeros.
Many
millions of fans are waiting breathlessly for the denouement – and
it’s a legion of fans that has grown exponentially over the
eight-year run. In the US, for example, the audience has grown from
2.5m viewers in the first season (2011) to an average of 10.3m during
season seven, which peaked at more than 12m viewers during the season
seven finale on August 27, 2017.
According
to MUSO, a magazine which specialises in piracy, the first episode of
season seven alone was pirated 91.74m times and the season
accumulated more than a billion illegal downloads a week after it
ended.
So
many people viewing outside of the official channels doesn’t just
suggest the incredibly large audience GoT can attract, it also
demonstrates the growth in illegal downloading of television shows –
11% last year – despite the effort of the streaming technologies to
kill off piracy.
Piracy
has its rewards
But
this hasn’t necessarily been a problem for HBO.
In 2013, the boss of Time-Warner (which owns HBO), Jeff Bewkes,
declared that piracy was: “Better than an Emmy” because more
people watching the show inevitably led to more people deciding to
pay for subscriptions. He said: We’ve been dealing with this for
20, 30 years – people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of
apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying
subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated
show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.
Since
then, GoT has repeatedly become the most pirated series of all time
in every season. And with season seven this record was broken yet
again.
