Slashdot Mirror
The Hobbit and Game of Thrones Top Most Pirated Lists of 2013
DavidGilbert99 writes "Fantasy fans are clearly among the most prevalent downloaders of pirated material if the 2013 lists of most pirated films and TV shows is anything to go by. The Hobbit beat Django Unchained and Fast and Furious 6 while on TV, Game of Thrones saw off competition from Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead as the most pirated TV show. While this is clearly losing money for both industries, the US box office doesn't seem to be suffering too much as it is about to record its best year ever."
... and then stating their high profits?
Okay. Explain. How are they "clearly losing money"? Prove it.
There's nothing "clearly losing money for both industries" about it. Fans will buy it on blu-ray or DVD, or even itunes as soon as it's available, replacing their existing copy. TV shows are irrelevant, they're invariably free to air and watching them via downloads the next day doesn't cost the cable company or the program maker anything. The advert slots have already been paid for weeks, if not months in advance.
The only exception is Thrones. HBO's refusal to let that out via alternative means in a timely manner is probably costing them. However, fans of the show will soon buy it on blu-ray when it eventually hits the shelves.
A shit director teamed up with a bunch of sleazy Hollywood execs to turn a short and beloved fantasy story into a gigantic three part turd of a movie series in order to try to milk as much cash out of the IP.
To start with a disclaimer: I haven't pirated The Hobbit (or indeed any other movies since my student days many, many years ago) and have no intention of doing so.
But on the other hand, after sitting through the first one, there is no way on Earth I am going to sit through the second one in a cinema. If I ever do watch it (which is a bit 50/50 given what a bad adaptation I thought the first one was), it will be in the comfort of my own home in a format where I can pause and resume at will, breaking it up into more manageable chunks.
I don't actually dislike going to the cinema; I'll happily sit through 2 hours or so of movie. But if you want me to go for a 3 hour+ bladder-bursting ass-numbing epic, then give me the opportunity to pause it for a while and go for a walk around in the middle.
Hell, I can still just about remember when longer films used to have an intermission during showings in a cinema. I know that's not an idea that's popular in the days of cram-'em-in multiplexes, but it might be worth bringing back for films like these to lure people like me back to the theatres.
All 3 seasons of GoT back in April. Saw both Hobbit movies in theaters though, full New York prices, sorry. I'm not DLing "epic" feature films to watch on my tv, GoT is on tv regardless. If it was on Hulu or NF I'ld watch GoT that way. Can I get HBOgo w/o HBO yet?
I sometimes download episodes I missed from tv series. Now they would call that pirating but seriously, what's the difference between recording it myself and watching it later, or having someone else record it, and I me downloading it and watching it later? I will not watch the ads anyway...
If having someone else record the show for me is pirating, does that mean that if I ask my neighbour to come to my house and start the recording of the show while I'm not home a form of pirating?
Try it! Library of Babel
Simple solution: Stop hiding your TV shows and films behind a wall of artificial scarcity. We have the internet which gives us instant access to whatever we want whenever we want. That has spoiled us and you (studios) haven't capitalized on this yet or are too damn slow.
Put your film in theaters. Once it is no longer profitable at the box office then put it on youtube (not some proprietary bullshit site that only runs in IE or some other nonsense) for a discounted rate and allow multiple viewings. Don't rent me a fucking film for $2.99 and then only give me access for a few days at most. That is a rip off. Let me pay a few bucks for a month or two or three. Honestly how much money will you lose if you let people have the movie for three months? How many times in one month is someone going to watch a movie? This is especially important for childrens shows/movies where they might want to watch it a hundred times.
TV shows, do what South Park does: Release the episode on both TV and the internet AT THE SAME TIME! Put a few commercials in there just like a regular TV episode and people will watch it. Or give them the option to pay a cheap monthly or yearly fee to watch commercial free. Id pay southpark studios a few bucks a month to watch their shows if I could see them all commercial free. If you are a premium show like Game of Thrones then do the same damn thing but for a fee. Let me watch an episode for a dollar and let me have access for a month or more. Or let me pay a few dollars to watch as many episodes as I would like for a month or so.
People have enough of a burden trying to pay bills/make a living and you expect us to spend hundreds on cable TV, tickets and DVD/BR *every month*. No thanks, we have better things to spend our money on. Your content is simply a time waster when we want to relax for a bit or go out every now and then. We dont need it and I am not willing to pay the exorbitant amount demanded. Adapt or die.
Are they 3D printing the CDs or what?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Last time I was forced to play Comcast's threaten-to-cancel-so-I-can-keep-my-promo-price game, I somehow ended up with a year of HBO. It's the biggest "meh" I've experienced in entertainment. There is never anything on I'm interested in. And it's not even in HD. There's like 800 channels of useless sports in glorious high definition and then HBO in low res.
:wq
I desperately want to give HBO my money. I sincerely do. I love Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, I don't have cable TV (just netflix, itunes, etc). I've looked into every option to buy Game of Thrones and give HBO my money. I've looked into HBOGo (their online streaming service), but unfortunately it requires an HBO subscription. I've looked into buying just HBO through my cable company, but unfortunately they won't allow that without buying a full cable TV package for $80 a month minimum. I've looked into buying it through itunes Australia since it was released early there, but unfortunately I can't without an Australian credit card and address.
I can't be the only one in this situation. It seems like HBO is trying to desperately cling to the old fashioned cable TV model where you have to be tied to a subscription cable service. We all know that model is dieing off with the older population. Hopefully in short time their attitudes will change.
Buy the fucking DVDs then, you idiot. If you want first run content, you have to subscribe. You don't like that since you feel like its not worth the cost, but it turns out that "i don't feel its worth the cost" holds up in court when you steal something.
Trolling out of the way, I totally agree that with the infrastructure available online there is no reason why direct digital distribution cant run just as well (and net HBO more money) than the old fashioned way with piece of shit QAM signals running around on coaxial cables.
Life is stressful, and for many entertainment is a valve for that stress. It's not that poor people downloading the Hobbit or Game of Thrones are causing a loss of sale on one or the other, it's that with a little bit of that stress relived they're much less likely to make a snap purchase (which they can't afford) to relieve that stress.
When add the fact that one or two players in the economy owns all the media and that corporate profits by and large go to 1% of the populace then the **AA's of the world's stance makes sense. It doesn't matter _what_ you buy, they make money either way. But they need you _ready_ to buy.
Let me put it this way: If you want chicken but you've got steak, odds are good you'll settle for chicken. If you've got neither I can sell you chicken.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yeah well they're living in a fantasy land if they think they're going to keep on getting away with it! Article 4.2 of the TPPA is coming to an ISP near them soon! Then we'll see whose fantasy we're living in.
The problem with "doing the right thing" is that you've likely forgotten about it but the time that the industry finally gets around to accommodating you.
I did this with a TV series I actually bought. By the time I finally watched it, it had gotten to Netflix by then. Felt a little silly really.
The LAST thing that American corporations want is for consumers to learn how to engage in self-deprivation. Screeching Puritans are pretty irrelevant in this regard. The "victim" here cares about hard currency. Notions of "crime and punishment" are likely the furthest thing from their minds.
Smug moral superiority doesn't pay the bills.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Those living in a fantasy land find it pretty easy to conjure up a reason why stealing content is perfectly ok. "Tyrion Lannister would do it!" sheesh
More than 200 years ago, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would agree with your notion that copying is some sort of crime.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Netflix is undergoing another content purge. I'm perfectly willing to pay for the service. There are some movies I never got around to watching that are disappearing. Oh, well. I'll have to pirate them then.
It's important to note how my viewing habits have changed.
Before the Internet: Tape from live TV, borrow from the library, Blockbuster
After the Internet: Tape from live TV for broadcast shows, watch crummy encodes of anime leeched from napster and other early p2p services, would buy reasonable sets of DVD's for material I love and will be rewatching.
After Bittorrent: All BT, all the time
After Netflix Streaming: Is it on Netflix? No? Ok, now start searching torrents.
I've gotten away from buying physical media because I don't have the space for it. I do want to reward the creators, I just don't have a proper means to do so. Here's the kicker: Netflix is MORE convenient than piracy. For a small fee, I have shows on my TV, laptop, phone, tablet, and they all stay in sync. I don't have to remember my watchlist. Hell, for TV downloads I keep a text file in the directory that I update after I'm done watching so I don't lose my place. That's less convenient than Netflix.
I'm happy to pay for a service that's timely and reasonable. I'm not waiting six months if the shit's done and released elsewhere. I'm also not paying a bajillion dollars because some executive's wife needs new tits.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Netflix does carry GoT, that's how I watched the first two seasons of it. I will watch the third season as well once they get it.
Butters complaining about "Floppy Penises" and "Where's the Dragons?!?" when talking about Game of Thrones. Of course Martin didn't order the pizzas and said that they would be coming and be the best! Oh and there would be five of them! An analogy of the dragons in GoT. Best three South Park Episodes ever!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
TV shows are not made to entertain people. They are made to gather people in front of a particular station, at a particular time, so that they become an "audience" (perhaps with a particular "demographic"), during which time the station SELLS YOUR EYEBALLS to advertisers. The "scarcity" model is not artificial; it is a crucial component of maintaining the novelty of the show so that it can be used as bait again to gather more eyeballs for more advertisements.
Once something is available on DVD (or, now, for streaming), it is automatically less valuable for re-runs, because everyone who wants to see it has already had the ability to see it whenever they want, instead of the once-a-year that "seasonal favorites" were released when I was a kid (and you HAD to be in front of the TV when it was on, because there was no home VCR to time-shift it). (Disney manages to suppress their content for years between releases, making scarcity itself a product.) Plus the producers cannot sell new advertisements; they had to make one-time deals even for "coming attractions" on the disk (out-of-date within a year, and therefore often of value only to the same producer), and certainly had to make a one-time deal for the cost of selling the material in physical form. No wonder they prefer the pay-per-view jukebox model.
Remember: In the video industry, if you can't see the product they are selling, it's YOU.
just a counter point, back then people made things for money, now we copy things for money. the economy has changed and the rules changed with it. However i think its time for the rules to change yet again.
These are the arguments I hate the most from the pro-piracy camp. You obviously aren't desperate enough to give HBO your money since you have multiple options:
1. Upgrade your cable package to get HBO. Pricey, but if you're truly desperate, there you go.
2. Purchase through iTunes. You won't get it immediately as it airs, but you'll get it.
3. Buy the Blu-Rays when they come out. Same drawback as point 2, but it's an option.
I think what you mean is that you're desperate to watch the show first run for a price that you consider reasonable (I'm guessing something in the neighborhood of $10 or less). Doesn't work that way.
> "the US box office doesn't seem to be suffering too much as it is about to record its best year ever."
Source? (I remember the last time I saw that claim on Slashdot, and discovered it was wrong.)
I wouldn't feel silly about that. When netflix finally goes under you'll still own the TV series. (unless you "bought" it as a rental flash movie from the original distributor.
Other Time Warner-owned networks to which one must subscribe before becoming allowed to subscribe to HBO, namely CNN, HLN, TBS, TNT, and Cartoon Netwoork, have commercials.
but it does need to be easy and available. Why don't I have netflix and hulu? Little islands of content. Give me everything, let me cache it locally, charge me a nominal fee, send the money to what ever I watch (wtf do I care if anonymized data is sent out). I use sickbeard/couch potato/sabnzbd and pay probably $180 a year and spend much more than that in my time to get whatever I want, playable just about whenever and however I want. I'd pay more for live streaming of ESPN (for example) and NFL if it were available - but it isn't!
Oh, and I own at least 80% of whats on my server as physical media purchased at retail. *shrug* HAving them delivered automatically is just better.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
HBO would probably sell much more of Game of Thrones if they didn't wait so damned long to release it on BluRay. Season 3 still cannot be purchased, and it was months since it was released.
If they can coordinate the massive undertaking of making such a series, filming episodes in parallel, then they can coordinate the making of the discs in parallel.
Their only reasoning must be "releasing just before the next season starts will whet their appetites", but what they don't realise in all their marketing "genius" is that they miss out on capitalising on the temporary hype they've just built up, plus they miss out on xmas sales.
People will return for the next season, something that they should have learnt by now.
I watched it twice in the theatre at $13 a pop or greater, they can go screw themselves.
I contributed to their box-office sales, they can blow me.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.