Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. It is an adaptation of "A Song of Ice and Fire", George R. R. Martin's series of fantasy novels, the first of which is "A Game of Thrones". It is filmed in Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland, Canada, Croatia, Iceland, Malta, Morocco, Scotland, Spain, and the United States. The series premiered on HBO in the United States on April 17, 2011, and its seventh season ended on August 27, 2017. The series will conclude with its eighth season premiering on April 14, 2019.
Game of Thrones
For "combating piracy", HBO said in 2013 that it intended to make its content more widely available within a week of the U.S. premiere (including HBO Go). In 2015, the fifth season was simulcast to 170 countries and to HBO Now users. On April 11, the day before the season premiere, screener copies of the first four episodes of the fifth season leaked to a number of file-sharing websites. Within a day of the leak, the files were downloaded over 800,000 times; in one week the illegal downloads reached 32 million, with the season-five premiere alone ("The Wars to Come") pirated 13 million times. The season-five finale ("Mother's Mercy") was the most simultaneously shared file in the history of the BitTorrent filesharing protocol, with over 250,000 simultaneous sharers and over 1.5 million downloads in eight hours. For the sixth season, HBO did not send screeners to the press, so as to prevent the spread of unlicensed copies and possible spoilers.