> 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.

I know tens of people that have watched game of thrones, maybe one or two legally. I think the real number might be higher then 17.8 million.