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 think these companies should run their own usenet servers, personally. That’s the only way they’re getting my money.
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
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.
Reminds me of Shrek 2. Which premiered 6 months after the US in my country.
I wanted so badly to watch it in cinema, but internet talked about it, friends talked about it, and I had people coming over with burned copies wanting to share it with me…
Yeah, I did not see it in cinema. For some reason it didn’t do well here.
It just seems retarded not to do global releases at this point. Like we’re all connected as hell. How do you expect to make one country wait 6 extra months? Just dumb. Lost revenue for no reason.
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
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.