House of the Dragon: Mega leak before the finale

The Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon is struggling with a leak: Two days before the planned first broadcast of the final episode of the first season, the episode entitled “The Black Queen” appeared on relevant torrent sites. A spokesman for the home broadcaster HBO confirmed this to the Deadline portal.

HBO is aware that the tenth episode of House of the Dragon was published on illegal torrent sites. It is not yet certain where the leak came from, but according to the website it is torrent geek limited to the EMEA region – this includes Europe, the Middle East and the African continent. This assumption is based on the frame rate of the leaked House of the Dragon episode, which is said to be 25 frames per second and thus exclude countries such as the USA, Japan or Brazil.

The suspicion is supported by a confidential source from Torrentfreak, according to which the original release came with a separate SRT file, which in turn contained Hebrew subtitles. HBO itself did not comment on the leak in the statement, but at least stated that they were working flat out to increase the illegal copies from the network. The company also expressed disappointment that the illegal act disrupted the TV experience for loyal fans. According to HBO, they can still look forward to a “flawless first broadcast in 4K quality” of the last House of the Dragon episode.

However, the leak of the finale of House of the Dragon shouldn’t come as a surprise: from September 7th to 21st, more than nine million people followed the GoT prequel via bittorrent. In the original series, too, episodes were regularly released in advance – not least in the case of the big HBO hack, in which several episodes of the seventh season were hijacked, among other things.

Source: deadline