At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.
The middle of the article however, destroys the author’s case.
Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.
“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”
The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the finances of his own show than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.
Needless to say, Tom forwent a rebuttal in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it…
Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1
Zero sympathy. If they wanted to reduce the amount of illegal streamers, all they’ve got to do is make their content more accessible.
Release it on multiple streaming platforms, not just their own. Ensure its released globally at the same time. And get rid of the geo-blocking.
The lack of reasonable legal alternatives is what drives piracy.
I would need even more. Let me buy it digitally. Not streamed, not with some draconian DRM. Just let me buy the MKV files straight from HBO, and I won’t pirate them.
They have to be aware of how easy it is to rip a blu-ray, yet those are still for sale. So let’s just skip the middleman and give me legal remuxes.
Even (some) porn sites (both paid and free) have drm free download buttons on their sites.
I mean… you can just pirate/download it, it takes literally 10 seconds once you know how… and to know how takes like 2 minutes lol
I wouldn’t be on this subreddit if I didn’t know that.
But I would also buy a lot more media if I could buy it in the way I want
As evidenced by the brief moment in history when Netflix was all that and it drove video piracy all but to extinction.
That´s so insane, right? I mean, they practically had us in the bag with netflix. People either had their own account or chipped in to use someone elses one BUT EITHER WAY, THEY PAID FOR IT! And then came one of the rare moments where more competition was actually bad.
It’s not the competition that’s bad! It’s the anti competitive laws that allowed it to spoil. Companies saw how profitable Netflix was and pulled their shows from the platform to artificially create a reason for consumers to use their own shitty services. Netflix was no longer able to purchase those titles.
I think with digital content platforms in general, competition means more headaches for customers.
The store front/streaming service is not what people sign up for, but the access to a certain movie, show or game. If the catalog of all available pieces of content gets scattered across multiple services you now have to use multiple apps, pay multiple subscription fees and search through multiple catalogs.
I’d say from a customer’s perspective, increased competition lead to a worse situation.
The thing here is that, for the most part, it’s not actually competition, but a collection of monopolies.
You want to watch show X? You have to go to the streaming service that has the monopoly on show X. It you want to watch that show, in many cases you can’t just substitute it for a different show.
If you have five stores selling all sorts of food, then that’s competition. If you instead have a butcher, a baker, a candy shop, a dairy shop and a fruits/vegetable shop, that’s splitting the turf. You can’t just substitute the ground beef for your burgers with skittles, because the butcher is more expensive than the candy shop.
Caveat to this argument: If you really don’t care about what you watch, then these different streaming services really are interchangable competitors and then the competition is good, because e.g. a shared Disney+ account is much cheaper than the now-non-shareable Netflix account.
This is the case still with Spotify, apple music, deezer, etc… Multiple services with few if any exclusives means almost all music piracy has stopped. Somehow, the record companies continue to survive.
And someone who knows better please correct me if I’m wrong, but 10 years ago for streaming is an eternity ago.
I believe back when the show was new and hot you could only watch HBO WITH a cable subscription
There’s a reason people pirated it instead of just subscribing
Ok, I was right: this late 2014 article says they’d finally offer standalone “next year”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/time-warner-hbo-stand-alone-subscription-netflix,27892.html
Edit: April 2015 is when it started. So quite a bit after GoT started
Yep, which is why many people had this exact experience: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Exactly
It started with HBO Now (or was it Go?) but you still needed a cable subscription to use it and then a year or two later they had the standalone version but it was a mess as some people had to use one but not the other depending on how they subscribed to HBO.
Ensure its released globally at the same time
This was easily the biggest driver. For GOT, I had legal access but I was expected to wait over a month, by which time because the internet - the spoilers would have been completely unavoidable.
Game of Thrones was destroyed by the writers lol
The call came from inside the house!!!
The files are in the computer
Incredibly relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
It’s been said a million times, but piracy is an accessibility issue. Chasing your favorite shows across streaming platforms is exhausting.
For a while there it was nigh impossible to legally get access to GOT in certain countries. Not to mention, when your only option is an insanity expensive streaming service, and the only thing you want there is one specific show, you’re likely to look for alternatives.
Not even just “certain countries”, in the U S of fuckin A.
The first four seasons, arguably the best seasons, were only available to HBO subscribers. The only way to get HBO was to be a cable subscriber. So you were paying probably $100 a month to watch one show. There is NO WAY that was going to be successful. This was the rise of Netflix. I could pay $100 per year for their content. By 2014/2015 I was getting House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Bojack Horseman, it was a great time.
Now lucky for HBO Game of Thrones is a powerhouse. So what do they do in 2015? They launch HBO Now… as an iOS exclusive. I want to pay you but you cut out half your audience? Guess I’m pirating Season 5 too.
Finally by season 6 HBO Now is available for everyone. I’ve now watched the majority of the show by pirating it. I don’t fault anyone who continued to do so. And this was the American experience. I can only imagine how other countries handled it.
Game of Thrones wasn’t in jeopardy because of piracy. Game of Thrones only succeeded due to piracy. It was a fantastic show (in the early seasons) but doomed to “cancelled too soon” without piracy.
Good thing they were fast enough to destroy it with the shittiest last season ever.
See, I think that was the plan all along, to totally own all the losers that pirated GoT, by totally spoiling the show for everyone.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
You could build a museum of horrible decisions and fill it with the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Whether you watched it or not, the show was a cultural touchstone, and the ending retroactively ruined everything that came before. Many shows have started well and ended poorly, but I’d argue that GoT was on pace to be an all-time top ten series, and there was absolutely nothing good to say about how it ended. Bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, sloppy editing, poor visual design, it was both rushed and too slow, and nothing made sense. If you paid someone to deliberately fuck up everything about the show, they would not have been as effective at it because it would have been obvious.
get your credit card stolen.
Let’s see… I don’t provide my credit card to anyone when pirating. The only way they are getting my credit card is breaking into my house. (no, mkv files can’t have viruses).
But I do need to provide my credit card info to HBO, which they store, on their likely poorly secured servers.
The number of credit cards stones from data leaks very likely exceeds the number of them stolen because someone got duped when trying to pirate.
Exactly, they are literally trying to scare people. There is objectively a lower chance of getting your credit card stolen from pirating than getting your credit card stolen from purchasing content legally.
We were so close to saving the world from the travesty that was the last couple seasons… I weep for what shouldn’t have been.
Damn, we should have tried harder to destroy it before Season 8 aired then. /s
As an example, the only reason there was ever any interest in Top Gear stateside was because of piracy. In my youth, that was the only way to watch it, and it showed the BBC that there was an interest, which led to it being made available through legitimate means in the US.
Piracy isn’t about free shit.
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Yeah I’d definitely agree. The amount of memes and just general sense of people buzzing about the show when it was at its peak was just unreal. And I’d argue that the fact it was being pirated and passed around so much was a big driver behind that. There’s no real way to test it, but without that big cultural drive would the show have done nearly so well? My suspicion is that it wouldn’t have. Not to mention all the knock-on effects such as launching the careers of many actors, who will go on to drive other hit shows etc.
Just seeing the issue as “someone watched a torrent of it so we lost the subscription fee” is extremely myopic IMO.
Those 24/7 Top Gear streams on justin.tv before they shut down and rebranded as Twitch turned me into a lifelong fan.
I have a prime subscription in part because is gives me access to both Top Gear and TGT.
It’s not even available in my own country to begin with lmao.
And I’ll fucking do it again
I couldn’t be paid to rewatch the last season of GoT
It was the most pirated series, because it was also incredibly popular.
It was incredibly popular because it was so pirated
Ye, the 2 things are pretty much connected 🤣
Honest question… how do you even know how many times a show was pirates? I mean the whole concept is to be de-centralized and anonymous.
The same way you know how many times a show was watched legitimately, you take a sample of known data and extrapolate it from there. It’s basically guesswork but it’s educated guesswork.
BitTorrent, even though it’s decentralised, is still operating on the public internet using public, known protocols. You can join a swarm and get an idea of how big that swarm is with a small amount of data inspection. I mean, your torrent client knows how many seeders and leechers there are, right? Just watch the swarms and extrapolate from there.
Any time you read these articles, they’re always caveated with something similar to “The number could be much higher than that” too because it’s not just torrents, you’ve got newsgroups, file shares, streaming sites, even old school IRC, people putting titles on a USB stick and so on. Hence there’s a lot of guessing, but it’s not entirely plucked from thin air.
Where it does get more bullshitty is when they try to translate those numbers into lost sales. That is just made up numbers as far as I’m concerned.
The correct way to put the title is “HBO’s Game of thrones was nearly destroyed by limiting access to it through high subscription costs for their platform.”
They did a good job destroying GoT by themselves tbh.
