Game of Thrones series 4 premiere crashes HBO site

The digital service for television channel HBO was forced to apologise to customers, after the site crashed following high demand for the series four premiere of Game of Thrones.

HBO GO asked fans to wait for a later replay of the episode on the cable channel.

Last month, the service crashed after demand to watch the finale of True Detective.

The service eventually was restored, but many fans' viewing was disrupted.

Game Of Thrones is largely filmed in Northern Ireland, and is shown on Sky in the UK

The disruption could have seen a boost in illegal downloading.

In 2012, one episode of Game of Thrones racked up 4,280,000 illegal global downloads, according to Torrentfreak. That was slightly more than its estimated US television audience.

The level of piracy may be linked to the fact that the TV company behind it - HBO - does not allow Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime or other US streaming services access to its programmes.

It instead restricts them to its own HBO Go online product, which is only available to its cable subscribers.

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