Game of Thrones The Most Pirated TV Show of the Season

TheGift73 sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "With nearly 4 million downloads per episode, the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is the most pirated TV-show of the season. Worldwide hype combined with restricted availability are the key ingredients for the staggering number of unauthorized downloads. How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory complete the top three, albeit with significantly fewer downloads than the chart topper. ... While there are many reasons for people to download TV-shows through BitTorrent, airing delays and HBO's choice not to make it widely available online are two of the top reasons."

Comments

I'm doing my part, are you?

[morari]

I just downloaded the entire second season a few days ago and began watching it. I have no interest in overpriced cable/satellite television. I'll probably pick it up on Blu-Ray next year, just like I did after pirating the first season. That's a lot better treatment than most of my pirated goods get. :P

Re:Why pirate network TV?

[Kohlrabi82]

I will explain the situation for Germany:

First of all, real popular shows you read about on the net normally haven't arrived on German networks, yet. Most of the time they arrive with at least one season lag, if at all. And even if you can watch the show by then, it is normally on networks which will drown you in ads every few minutes.

And don't get me started that not even today, with the full digitization of TV, you have the option to watch foreign shows undubbed in Germany. If you ever had to suffer through the German dubs of TV shows, you would no doubt also strongly consider piracy.

Of course you can wait for the DVD/BD box to arrive, containing an English audio track, but those may again arrive late or not at all. Coincidentally, GoT has been an exception here. Also, the pricing is oftentimes on the ludicrous side, and thanks to DVD and BD DRM you cannot even just get the US release.

Re:If not artificial scarcity then what?

[HapSlappy_2222]

Well, the reality is pretty simple. The show creators can:

1- Lower the cost of production (this, of course, risks lowering the quality of the product)
2- Increase the revenue brought in by the show to compensate for the higher production values, which can be done by:
2a- Sell as many units of your product to as many consumers as possible at the highest price the market will bear (which is calculated from factors such as competition, demand, available supply, and elasticity of your product). This is the ideal situation. If you cannot make a profit doing this, you must resort to option 1 above or 2b below, and should probably be planning on ways to get here through better marketing, better distribution, better quality, better price, or lower elasticity (i.e. make your product one that people can't live without). If you cannot do this, you should be questioning how viable your product is.
2b- Create artificial scarcity in order to get a higher sales price at the risk of not selling to as many consumers (this almost guarantees a very high rate of piracy for digital goods). This is especially effective for ultra-high demand goods, like jewelry, which oddly enough only has value because it is scarce in the first place.

Disclaimer: It's been many years since my ECON classes; someone will surely have better or more correct ways to put this.

Businesses have been using option 2b for years and years, and it works terrifically, until people find a way to do an end-run around your artificial scarcity techniques. It's never been easier to do this than now, with the advent of the digital age. While I don't have the answer to your question, it's obvious that protecting the ability to create artificial scarcity for digital goods simply isn't long-term viable option.

I guess this is why we are seeing a new wave of "constantly phoning home" software; it's really the last line of defense for digital scarcity. I have no doubt that it's a stop-gap solution, too; I don't think consumers will stand for this behavior over the long run. Can you imagine what things will be like when every piece of software you use needs to constantly fire off packets to stay running? Not just Diablo 3, but Office, Photoshop, or what the hell, Windows?

I always find it interesting how corporations rail against the morality of piracy, which is questionably effective as a deterrent, and try to use that to justify everything from stronger copyright laws to DRM. I think they use moral dogma to train honest consumers that increasingly draconian protection is a necessary pain in the ass due to the evil pirates, rather than to actually prevent people from pirating their product. They HAVE to realize that since digital piracy isn't going away, the right or wrong of it is irrelevant, from a practical standpoint. Once honest consumers realize this, too, and how much easier AND cheaper it is to just pirate crap they want, they'll become significantly less honest. Can these corps really not see the end result of this cycle? I envision one last very rich fellow as the sole customer for all software, paying millions of dollars for each title, with the rest of the world downloading his provided software cracks, lighting his PayPal account up each time.

Re:If not artificial scarcity then what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue with HBO is that they are not an independent company. With their programming, they are one of the few companies that could make a killing by distributing online, as we all know. However, they are a division of Time Warner. The rest of their channels just don't have the pull HBO has. What would happen to them if they started selling HBO without a cable contract?

Large conglomerates lead to decisions like this: good for the conglomerate, bad for some divisions, and most customers.

Re:If not artificial scarcity then what?

[LordLucless]

So you are saying everyone is entitled to cheap entertainment, cheap being whatever you dictate.

It's got nothing to do with entitlement. It's just what's going to happen. Restrict a market, a black market develops. You can bitch and moan about it all you like, but if you want to solve it, you need to address the root cause of why that market developed. Trying to legislate it away is futile, as it just further restricts the market, and enhances the value of the black market further.

I don't think there is a good excuse for unlicensed viewing of recorded entertainment other than "because we can."

And I don't think there is a good excuse for 100+ years of copyrighting entertainment otgo unheard.her than "because we can". Unfortunately, since I don't "donate" millions to politicians, my thoughts don't appear to count.