The unexpected leak of four Game Of Thrones episodes resulted in enormous file sharing activity on the worlds top torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, Torrentz and EZTV.

The highly anticipated debut of Game Of Thrones season five was accompanied by a huge online leak of the first four episodes of the series. The source, thought to be a reviewer who received advance preview copies of the episodes, first leaked the episodes to a private tracker on Sunday, and soon they were all over the top public torrent sites on the net, including The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, EZTV and others.

The resulting scramble by file sharers resulted in record activity for a file group at one time, and will ultimately result in millions of downloads of the episodes. The regions accounting for the most downloads are, unsurprisingly, the US and UK, followed by India, Canada and France.

Due to the nature of the leak, which involved multiple episodes and grew over a period of time, the Game Of Thrones download activity still did not set a record for most simultaneous downloads of one file at a single time. That honor still belongs to Game Of Thrones, but for the season four finale episode.

The first twelve hours of the leak saw 1.5 million downloads occur, and it is expected that when all is said and done, that number could swell to 7.5 million or more.

The leak is certainly a blow to HBO, which just debuted its highly publicized HBO Now streaming service on Apple and Optimum Online platforms. The premium service was timed in conjunction with the Game Of Thrones season 5 premiere, in hope of enticing customers who wanted to watch the series but didn't have cable. Now it appears many of those viewers found another way to watch the series free, and to enjoy several episodes in advance of even HBO's paying customers.

TAG HBO, Torrents

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