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      House of the Dragon : quel avenir pour l’univers Game of Thrones ?

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Monday, 4 December - 11:08

    House Of The Dragon Game Of Thrones Séries Projets

    House of the Dragon s'apprête à revenir pour une seconde salve d'épisodes. L'univers Game of Thrones a encore de nombreuses histoires à raconter, quels sont les projets en réflexion ?

    House of the Dragon : quel avenir pour l’univers Game of Thrones ?

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      Most Pirates Skipped the Leaked ‘House of the Dragon’ Season Finale

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Friday, 28 October, 2022 - 20:50 · 2 minutes

    hotd With many millions of viewers on official platforms, “House of the Dragon” has had an excellent debut season.

    The Game of Thrones prequel could also count on plenty of interest on pirate sites, where it’s been the most sought-after title of the past few weeks.

    HBO Responds

    Given its popularity, the leak of the season finale last Friday was headline news. The unprecedented leak also elicited a response from HBO, wth a spokesperson informing us that the company was pulling out all the stops to take copies offline.

    “HBO is aggressively monitoring and pulling these copies from the internet. We’re disappointed that this unlawful action has disrupted the viewing experience for loyal fans of the show, who will get to see a pristine version of the episode when it premieres Sunday on HBO and HBO Max, where it will stream exclusively in 4K.”

    The entertainment company can’t complain about a lack of interest from legal viewers; the season finale drew a 9.3 million audience on Sunday. That’s the biggest audience since the conclusion of Game of Thrones three years ago.

    Apparently, many loyal fans were happy to wait for the official release, instead of checking out the pirated leak. But what about the general pirate audience? Did they decide en masse to tune in early? It doesn’t seem that way.

    Downloads Peaked After Finale

    After running the numbers based on a large sample of torrent data provided by IKnow *, we see that there were significantly more people downloading House of the Dragon over the past weekend. These numbers roughly doubled compared to earlier weeks.

    Interestingly, however, most downloads still took place on Monday. This shows that most pirates also preferred to wait for the ‘official’ high-quality pirate release. Or perhaps they were simply unaware of the leak?

    Estimated Torrent Downloads (sample)

    hotd chart

    The overall pattern, as seen in the chart above, shows that downloads typically peaked on Monday, to then drop off throughout the rest of the week. Last week was a clear exception as download numbers started to rise on Friday, the day of the leak.

    Leak Source?

    As promised, HBO and its licensing partners have been very busy trying to remove pirated releases. Many URLs were pulled from search engines and pirate sites that are responsive to DMCA takedowns.

    The source of the leak wasn’t disclosed but HBO informed us that it appears to have originated from a distribution partner in the EMEA region. This matches information we received from several other sources.

    Our sources report that the initial leak, which came with Hebrew subtitles, originated from an Israeli release group on a private torrent tracker. This suggests that there’s a link to Israel. We asked HBO to confirm or deny this, but the company chose not to comment any further.

    (*) These data represent a large sample of all estimated House of the Dragon torrent downloads on a given day. These are not per individual episode but a day-to-day increase can generally be attributed to new releases. Private trackers are excluded.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      House of The Dragon Season Finale Leaks Early on Pirate Sites (Updated)

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Saturday, 22 October, 2022 - 20:45 · 2 minutes

    house of dragons The debut of HBO’s “ House of the Dragon ” in August didn’t disappoint. Since then it has averaged dozens of millions of views per episode.

    The show was also an instant success on pirate sites where, in true Game of Thrones spirit , it was leaked before the official premiere.

    In the weeks that followed “House of The Dragon” crushed “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” in the unofficial pirate download rankings. At this rate, it’s on track to become the most pirated TV show of the year. And today’s news certainly doesn’t hurt that ‘aspiration’.

    A few hours ago, copies of the tenth episode appeared on Usenet and pirate sites, two days before the general public will have access to it on legal platforms. News of the leak is spreading quickly and tens of thousands of people have already grabbed an illicit copy.

    House.Of.The.Dragon.S01E10.1080p.WEB-DL.H.264

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    It wouldn’t be a major surprise to see these download statistics exceed more than a million copies before Sunday. Significant numbers of people will also watch the episode through pirate streaming sites, which will boost the numbers even further.

    The source of the leak remains unknown at the time of writing but there are some data points that may help to narrow things down. The video comes in 25fps, which eliminates countries such as the US, Japan, and Brazil.

    In addition, a trusted source informs us that the original release came with Hebrew subtitles in a separate .srt file. These original releases are typically shared on private servers, which act as central points before distribution groups start sharing them on pirate sites.

    We were not able to verify this information independently, but it could be a hint that there are links to Israel.

    No matter what the source is, it will be hard to do anything about it now. The company and its licensing partners will likely spend much of the weekend sending takedown requests but for HBO, most of the damage is already done.

    Update: An HBO spokesperson sent us the following statement after publication.

    “We are aware that the tenth episode of House of the Dragon has been posted on illegal torrent sites. It appears to have originated from a distribution partner in the EMEA region.”

    “HBO is aggressively monitoring and pulling these copies from the internet. We’re disappointed that this unlawful action has disrupted the viewing experience for loyal fans of the show, who will get to see a pristine version of the episode when it premieres Sunday on HBO and HBO Max, where it will stream exclusively in 4K.”

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      “House of the Dragon” Crushes “The Rings of Power” on Pirate Sites

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Sunday, 25 September, 2022 - 18:17 · 2 minutes

    house of dragons With the release of HBO’s “ House of the Dragon ” and Amazon’s “ The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power ,” two major fantasy series premiered last month.

    The former was an instant success on pirate sites where, in true Game of Thrones spirit , it was leaked before the official premiere.

    While both series are hard to compare, the media has pitted them against each other to see which one performs best. Does “The Rings of Power” dwarf “House of the Dragon” or vice versa?

    In terms of user ratings, the Game of Thrones prequel wins by a landslide but official viewer statistics are harder to come by. According to Variety, the Dragons now average 29 million viewers per episode. Amazon hasn’t released much data on its billion-dollar production but previously said that the Rings premiere drew a 25 million audience.

    Dragon Crushes Rings on Pirate Sites

    To add our two cents to this battle, we decided to take a look at how both series are doing on pirate sites. With help from IKnow , we looked at a large sample of millions of global BitTorrent transfers over the past two weeks (7-21 September) which resulted in a clear winner.

    “House of the Dragon” takes the crown with more than 1.4 million estimated downloads on peak days. During the two weeks that we collected sample data, the show amassed over 9 million estimated downloads.

    Estimated Torrent Downloads (sample)

    The graph above shows that The “Rings of Power” doesn’t even come close with a maximum of roughly 650k estimated downloads. It typically beats the GOT prequel by just a small margin, shortly after a new episode is released. Over the two weeks, this resulted in 5 million downloads.

    To give an indication of how popular “House of the Dragon” is, on the day of release the show is good for more than 10% of all movie and TV show downloads. That’s a percentage we haven’t seen for a while.

    Russia on top

    Looking at the countries where “House of the Dragon” is most downloaded, Russia is clearly in the lead. This makes sense as torrent downloads are traditionally popular there. Also, as a result of sanctions due to the Ukraine invasion, there are no legal options to watch the series.

    Brazil is the second on the list of countries, while the United States takes the third spot. The top ten is completed by India, the UK, South Africa, China, the Philippines, Australia and France.

    The data shared here cover a large chunk of the estimated public torrent downloads. However, this only represents a small portion of all piracy activity, as ‘views’ on unauthorized streaming sites can’t be measured so easily.

    That said, we believe that torrent downloads are a good proxy for the overall interest among pirates.

    Most Pirated?

    The overall conclusion that pirates prefer Dragons over Rings is also corroborated by piracy tracking firm MUSO. The company told Adweek that there is significantly more interest in the Game of Thrones prequel on torrent sites.

    The popularity by itself doesn’t say much about how much people like the shows. Amazon Prime tends to be cheaper in many countries and more widely available too, so that could play an important role as well.

    At this rate, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see “House of The Dragon” pick up where Game of Thrones left off . That is, the TV series is well on its way to becoming the most pirated TV show of 2022.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      GOT Prequel “House of the Dragon” Premiered Early on Pirate Sites

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Tuesday, 23 August, 2022 - 08:52 · 2 minutes

    house dragon When it comes to piracy records and juicy headlines, the original Game of Thrones series holds the crown.

    The popular TV series still holds the record for the largest torrent swarm and its releases caused a significant boost in global piracy traffic .

    Game of Thrones also made headlines on several occasions when episodes leaked online before their official premiere. This is a hard track record for the prequel “ House of the Dragon ” to compete with, but early signs show that the ‘leak’ tradition continues.

    “House of the Dragon” Piracy Premiere

    The first “House of the Dragon” episode premiered on Sunday 9 pm Eastern Time in the United States and it was simulcasted in many other countries around the world. However, when fans were getting ready for the official release, many pirates had already finished the episode.

    Pirated copies of the highly anticipated release surfaced roughly 15 hours before the official release. The source of ‘leak’ is unknown, but it appears to come from an official HBO feed that was made available early.

    Whatever the source, fans were quick to spot this surprise release. While many preferred to wait until the official release was out, hundreds of thousands were not that patient and chose to download or stream the pirated version instead.

    Massive Interest

    Before the official premiere, hundreds of thousands of people had already grabbed a ‘leaked’ copy through torrent sites. In addition, many more used pirate streaming sites to watch the “House of the Dragon” premiere.

    house of the dragon twitter

    As a result, the early release of “House of the Dragon” was the most pirated TV show on Sunday, even before the official version came out. The piracy figures don’t rival any records set by Game of Thrones just yet, but the show is on its way to becoming one of the most pirated shows of the year.

    There has been plenty of interest through legal channels as well. In fact, some people indicated that they preferred to wait until the official version came out.

    dragon-reddit

    HBO Max Crashes

    According to HBO, millions of people ‘legally’ tuned into the show on Sunday evening, which is a lot for a show premiere. While torrents generally benefit from widespread attention, the same can’t be said for centralized streaming platforms.

    This resulted in some small problems, including HBO crashing on Fire TV devices . Whether any of these Fire TV users turned to pirate alternatives out of frustration is unknown, but HBO may want to fix this problem before the next episode comes out.

    The early signs suggest that “House of the Dragon” will be good for some piracy headlines going forward. In addition to the early premiere, HBO previously had its hands full with a mystery Reddit user who leaked plot summaries for the upcoming season.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.