Comment by NocturnalEngineer@lemmy.world on Game of Thrones was nearly "destroyed" by pirates illegally streaming HBO content

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.

As evidenced by the brief moment in history when Netflix was all that and it drove video piracy all but to extinction.

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.

I think we’re going to start to see music services going that way soon, for the first time I’ve started to see that songs in my primary play list are now not available in my region.

I admit I dont know what songs yet, am on a road trip at the moment, but it makes me worry that it’s going to get worse.

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.

Yeah, It´s kinda fucked up since normally, competition is good for the customer. It´s a good thing to have different stores you can go to. It´s a cood thing to have different car or moobile phone brands to chose from.

With streaming though, I can´t really think of any real world situation where the customer actually is worse off with more variety to chose from.

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.

What does this have to do with laws though? I find it pretty reasonable for a film company to be able or allowed to run their own streaming platform and just not sell their shows to say netflix. If I create something that I want to sell my self, in my own store, there should be no law forcing me to also hand it over to that supermarket down the streat to sell it there. And if I want to charge a monthly fee for even being able to enter my own little store, that should also not be prohibited.

Imagine there would be a law that said, every studio would also have to sell their stuff to netflix. You think, Netflix wouldn´t immediately abuse this power to drive any competition out of business?

Don´t get me wrong, I HATE that to be able to watch all the stuff I might be interrested in, I´d have to subscribe to like 5 different services. I just don´t see how laws would be a good tool to deal with that.

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 download 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.

Tbf Blu Ray is a good distribution media. It’s the DRM that’s ruining it.

The DRM pipedream has been going on for so long in the industry that it’s basically dogma at this point. Everybody knows it doesn’t work but they’re in too deep to question it.

Oh dear, don’t get me started on that. I had to buy expensive software to play back the few Blu-Rays i have. CyberDVD doesn’t even allow you to skip intro videos and anti-piracy crap. You know, the crap we didn’t do when we bought the medium or ignore anyway if we create our own backups or share the media illegally.

Also i hate region-locking. I bought the complete Daria DVD collection which lacks the original soundtrack btw. And i am not permitted to watch it because what? International copyright? Technological differences we overcame long ago?

I can switch the region of my blu-ray drive in my PC 5 times. After that it will stay in the last configured region. A very, VERY arbitrary limitation!

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

I remember here in the Netherlands that you could only watch HBO through a specific internet provider (ziggo-Vodafone). I’d have to switch goddamn ISP’s to pay for their show. That gave me all the justification to pirate the shit out of it.

I can’t fathom why these media companies still love to do exclusivity agreements. There’s no way it’s more profitable than just allowing everyone to watch your show from any service, with commissions for the number of views.

I’d probably start paying for a streaming service again if I could watch every show in one place. But I’m not interested in playing musical subscriptions.

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.

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

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.

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Game of Thrones was nearly "destroyed" by pirates illegally streaming HBO content(www.forevergeek.com)

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