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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."
Game of Thrones, one of the best selling TV shows on blu-ray.
The oatmeal covers this pretty well. When people complain and are waving money at you and you don't want to take it, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Om, nomnomnom...
Why does it matter? Haven't we had enough discussions on this particular topic?
I can't think of any online TV show viewers that buffer the video in any appreciable way. Downloading the show via BitTorrent is pretty much the only way to guarantee the show can be watched on a slow connection, or, in the case of HD video, viewed at all without constant underruns.
We've had a 1000+ post flamewar over this not even a month ago.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I think what the GP meant was obscene stupidity. If you can sell a thousand copies for $100 each, or a million copies for $10 each, and choose the former, the only thing to do is take your executives out to the barn with a shotgun. Or at the very least, not complain when people copy your shit.
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.
It's not a right, it's a simple business practice called Price elasticity of Demand.
In a nutshell, the lower the price of something the more demand there will be. It's not necessarily a linear graph (i.e. 10 people will pay $100 but 100 people will pay $10) and it varies depending on the product, what time of year it is, the market in general etc. but the principal is always the same.
In this case, all people want is the ability to pay for just the standalone service that they want rather than having to buy bundles of crap they don't need.
I'm not even from the US, I can't get "HBO" and I support this philosophy - I have 165 TV channels due to my provider's "packages" and I find myself switching between about the same 10 or 15 in the average week, some of which are free to air anyway.
To make matters worse, with my current provider there is absolutely no way I can watch Game of Thrones, no matter how much money I throw at them - they don't have the channel that shows it, only one provider does and its exclusive to them and only them (for those wonder, I live in the UK, use Virgin Media for their broadband and Sky Atlantic is the Channel that shows Game of Thrones, which Sky refuses to share with Virgin).
To use an analogy, you want to buy a music track. That music track is part of an album of 12 other songs, most of which are terrible and 1 or 2 are maybe "listenable". Not only this, but there's only one music service that sells this album and it's not compatible with your current MP3 player.
You COULD buy a new mp3 player, switch to the new music service (or carry multiple devices) and spend 5x more than the one song is actually worth OR just download the MP3 of the song illegally.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Incidentally, many people in the uk live in residences which do not permit the installation of satellite dishes, and thus CANNOT get sky, and therefore cannot legally watch game of thrones irrespective of how much they are willing to pay.
There are people in other countries in a similar boat...
For many people, piracy is the only option available to them at all.
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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.
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.
Crap. This is a classic argument that falls down. Let me spell it out for you.
Your argument: The customer can:
The reality: The customer can:
Yes. There are some people who will pirate something regardless of what you do. The reality is that most people, given the opportunity to get something good in a form they want for a reasonable price will jump on it (Steam, Good old Games, Louis C.K., etc... have proved this). Most of those that do end up pirating are kids who probably couldn't afford it anyway (who later become paying fans), or people who wouldn't pay for it whatever. I'm not saying there are not sales lost to piracy, but there are far, far more lost to giving us content in a rubbish way for too much. Inconvinience us and of course we'll take it for free without the inconvinience. Not only that, but you are giving people a way to justify it to themselves morally.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Exactly, you hit the nail right on the head there...
Media is marketed in such a way so as to put a lot of pressure on people to watch it, and make them feel bad if they haven't seen it while all their friends have. People who have not seen the latest shows are stigmatised as being "out of touch".
If you do this, and then don't provide a method by which people can actually buy the content, then they will have no recourse but to pirate it.
It's also now common to have friends in different countries, thanks to the internet... So the old model of releasing content significantly later in different countries becomes extremely damaging too... When participating in multinational forums on the internet, you are considered to be behind the times, from a backwater and looked down upon if you have to wait 6 months to see the shows everyone else is watching.
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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.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face