Game of Thrones (season 1)
The first season of the fantasy drama television series "Game of Thrones" premiered on HBO on April 17, 2011 in the U.S., and concluded on June 19, 2011. It consists of ten episodes, each of approximately 55 minutes. The series is based on "A Game of Thrones", the first novel in the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George R. R. Martin, adapted for television by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. HBO had ordered a television pilot in November 2008; filming began the following year. However, it was deemed unsatisfactory and later reshot with some roles being recast. In March 2010, HBO ordered the first season, which began filming in July 2010, primarily in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with additional filming in Malta.
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.