Game of Thrones, The Handmaid's Tale and other exclusive TV shows trigger spike in digital piracy

'To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer'

(HBO)

The increasing number of streaming services has coincided with a spike in piracy of television shows, a survey has found.

The growing use of Netflix, iPlayer and Amazon Prime initially led to a decrease in the number of people watching their favourite shows by illegal means.

Between 2011 and 2015, the percentage of internet traffic in Europe being used by the file sharing website BitTorrent fell from 59.68% to 21.08%.

However, since then, the number of people using BitTorrent has increased by 10 per cent – something the Vice President of Global Marketing at Sandvine, who conducted the survey, has put down to the growing number of exclusive shows on streaming services.

“More sources than ever are producing ‘exclusive’ content available on a single streaming or broadcast service — think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryan for Amazon,” Cullen writes.

“To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer, so they subscribe to one or two and pirate the rest.”

The number of exclusive titles on differing streaming services will only increase in the following years. One of the biggest upcoming examples is the upcoming Star Wars TV series, which will only be available on Disney’s new streaming service.

Meanwhile, the most-downloaded show illegally last year was Game of Thrones, an HBO exclusive that was only made available in the UK on Sky Atlantic and the streaming service NowTV.