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Australians have heavily pirated the latest episode of television medieval drama Game of Thrones despite the season five premiere smashing Australian pay-TV audience records.
On Tuesday, pay TV provider Foxtel announced Game of Thrones was the most watched series in Australian subscription television history with 553,000 tuning into the premiere of the fifth season aired on Monday, a 76 percent increase on last season.
However, according to German piracy tracking firm Excipio, almost 150,000 Australians downloaded copies within six hours of its worldwide premiere.
Australia ranked fourth in the world with 148,855 illegal copies from the worldwide total of 2,348,217.
According to Nielsen Twitter TV ratings, more than half-a- million Game of Thrones-related tweets were view by Australians on Monday, making the season five premiere the biggest non-sport TV event on Twitter in the country.
Much of that was driven by the Foxtel audience where a combined cumulative average audience of 242,000 tuned into the worldwide premiere at 11:00 a.m. Monday before another 311,000 watched the encore screening at 7:30 p.m.
In March, the US network producing Game of Thrones, HBO (Home Box Office), decided to combat the high rate of piracy for its show by airing season five episodes simultaneously in 170 countries.
Those plans were partially ruined when copies of the first four episodes were leaked online over the weekend. It is believed they were review copies provided to the media.
Australians continued to download the show and were not scared off by last week's recent landmark piracy case involving Hollywood film Dallas Buyers Club, where a Federal Court judge ordered Internet service providers to hand over the identities of thousands of account holders who had illegally downloaded the film.
Game of Thrones is based on George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song Of Ice and Fire, where political and sexual intrigue abound as seven noble families fight for control of the mythical land of Westeros.
