People had watch parties the moment episodes dropped for GoT. Bars would even air episodes in later years. Most of the world watched it together, both legally and illegally. It was definitely the same thing.
> Sunday's episode of "Game of Thrones" notched a series record of 17.8 million viewers, according to HBO. "The Long Night" broke the record set by the season premiere just two weeks ago when 17.4 million viewers tuned in.
> 106 million people watched ‘M.A.S.H.’ finale 35 years ago. No scripted show since has come close.
Note that these are raw numbers, not percentage of population. There are more people now than there were when "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" aired, but the broadcast TV episode still got more human beings to watch it.
Maybe almost 100 million watched Game of Thrones illegally.
> Maybe almost 100 million watched Game of Thrones illegally
I think you hit the nail on the head. I live in a country where you can't, to my knowledge, get HBO legally at all, and yet a huge number of people kept up with it, to the point of having a weekly watching party when the series was live. It only takes one tech-savvy person and a USB stick.
This was probably more true a decade ago than it is now. Pirating shows isn't hard, but it's slightly less easy than watching Netflix, so it only matters if the shows on The Pirate Bay are enough better than the shows on whichever streaming service you have to be worth the inconvenience.
There are a lot of good shows on Netflix. Enough that people don't have time to watch even them -- especially now that the Internet is a thing and a lot of the time people used to spend watching TV is now spent watching YouTube or hanging out on Reddit or whatever.
So if you have Netflix and not HBO then you're several times more likely to have watched Stranger Things than Game of Thrones because it was easier to do it. And for the same reason, people don't subscribe to twelve different streaming services, because they don't even have time to watch all the shows on one of them. Which means there's now a lot more fragmentation in what people have watched.
Do you think these are counted differently? TV viewers statistics often use average number of people in a household, iirc. I would guess the HBO number is just the actual number of plays, no matter how many people viewed on that screen.
And Friends, Simpsons, Seinfeld etc were things whole families watched together (depending on the kids’ ages of course). Families are not watching GoT and Westworld together en masse. TV shows filled with violence and boobs just aren’t going to be ‘everyone’s seen it’ shows like tamer ones, even if it feels to 20-year-olds like ‘everyone’ has seen them.
Overall, when accounting for all platforms and delayed viewing throughout the week, the final season of Game of Thrones averaged more than 44 million viewers per episode [1]
Game of Thrones’ season 8 premiere was pirated almost 55 million times in the first 24 hours [2].
And this is when people have 100 times more choices every day.
> Data from piracy monitoring firm MUSO indicates the show was pirated 54 million times in the first 24 hours. That’s a steep increase from the season seven premiere, which set piracy records of its own, with 90 million illegal viewings in 72 hours.
