Earlier this week, CBS aired the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery, the first TV series set in the universe since Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. As expected, the premiere of the show was met with widespread viewership, raking in over 10 million viewers to CBS on Sunday.
While the first episode of the season was made available on CBS" over-the-air network, the rest of the episodes are exclusive to CBS All-Access, the network"s streaming service. The hope for the decision was to entice the massive following of the franchise to subscribe to the service and while no numbers were provided by the company, it did state that signups on the day of the premiere exceeded previous records.
However, restricting access to such a popular franchise also had the significant risk of encouraging users to simply pirate the TV show and it seems that"s precisely what happened. The first two episodes of the show are currently among the top 20 torrents on The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrenting websites on the web.
The top of that list is dominated by Game of Thrones episodes but Episodes 1 and 2 of Discovery rank 9th and 19th on the list, respectively. The premiere, in fact, seems to also be climbing the list, going from the twelfth position to the ninth in just a few hours.
Via: Ars Technica