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
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.
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.