Game of Thrones: Piracy 'better than Emmy' for HBO as it battles Netflix

The competition for the Iron Throne on the screen is paralleled - in the real world - by the epic struggle for supremacy in television production

Eight years after the first season premiered, the long-awaited winter has finally come – Game of Thrones’ final season is here. The television series created by David Benioff and Daniel Brett Weiss from the books by George RR Martin has built a rich and complex multi-thread plot-knot of epic battles, of the living and the undead, of long owed-debts to be paid, and of the culmination of clan stratagems to win the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms.

But at the end of season seven in the autumn of 2017, it wasn’t the clan warfare that had us cliffhanging, but