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
To add to what burndown said.
Before streaming services were the de facto place to watch movies and TV at home, cable companies would charge a monthly fee to provide live cable TV. TV shows aired weekly and if you miss an episode on Cable, unless you happened to set it to record, you can't watch that episode until the network decides to air it again, hours or days later, what was known as a "rerun."
Cable is a live broadcast sent from the cable provider, (think youtube livestreams that play family guy 24/7) streaming is an on-demand platform for content. So in Canada, if the only place to watch Game of Thrones legally is cable, that limits your viewing time, what episode you watch, and the order in which you watch the show/movies, greatly impacting the viewing experience.
So cable and streaming are separate, cable is more expensive and less enjoyable than streaming, but at the end of the day they're two different methods of watching TV.
I'll just add that the last part about streaming being cheaper isn't so true as when the show was airing. Cable companies (some at least) have seen the writing on the wall and have dropped prices and with the abhorrent amount of exclusivity crap going on with streaming services and ever increasing fees on everything, a lot of people have found it's cheaper for them to go back to cable. Keeping in mind a lot of cable services include a streaming branch of their service now so the days of horrible inconvenience are dying out. It's quite fun to see for those of us who hate the practices going on in streaming lately.
Not sure if it’s the same in Canada, but the US has an insane amount of people who pay for cable still, even in areas with high speed internet. I honestly don’t understand how people like it, especially with how expensive it is. It’s even worse if they have satellite and it cuts out during storms.