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
Good thing they were fast enough to destroy it with the shittiest last season ever.
See, I think that was the plan all along, to totally own all the losers that pirated GoT, by totally spoiling the show for everyone.
Let's be real. HBO wanted to hold on to their cash cow for as long as possible, but D&D just shat all over the last season to get that sweet Star Wars cash.
Nobody was on-board with anything in that last season except D&D, who just wanted to finish it off as fast as possible. Not even the actors.
The hilarious thing is how their own bungling of the last season cost them the Star Wars gig. Maybe if they'd actually put in some effort instead of half assing it, they'd have gotten the job. But then again, the show was on a downward spiral since the end of Season 4, and Dumb and Dumber's only talent was adapting the books really well (and even then, they still fudged details), so I suppose this was bound to happen.
Honestly, I want more Hollywood writers who are good at adapting books, instead of hating the source material and doing a terrible job winging it.
I can't count the number of TV shows ruined by Hollywood writers usurping the universes from multi-million dollar and very successful source material, just to create their own shitty version themselves. In fact, it's much easier to adapt source material, so I don't even understand why they don't do it out of pure laziness. If they could just drop their fucking egos for a bit, they could be as famous as D&D.
Another recent example of a horrible adaptation of a massive franchise is what Paramount did to Halo with their show. I can't understand why they keep hiring writers that actively hate the source material and are only interested in taking existing stories and mangling them into their own shitty "vision". It's like Hollywood either hates writers who have actual passion for the franchises they're adapting, or they can't find them, which can't be the case since these are beloved universes with millions of fans, many of whom are bound to be writers eager to work on an adaptation. They always hire talentless hacks interested in nothing more than a paycheck and doing what they want, not what the fans want. It's infuriating.
Witcher, Foundation, The Stand, Y: The Last Man, Wheel of Time, recent Star Trek, Rings of Power, Legend of the Seeker... the list goes on and on. Sandman is only good because Neil Gaiman is keeping a tight leash on the series.
And then they cancel the rest that were turning out good, like The Expanse.
Do you notice a pattern?
Every single one of those is either SF or Fantasy.
There are a lot of artsy lovers of literature out there who hate exactly those genres, and who have a burning passion to fix all the (perceived) flaws which (in their view) come baked into them.
As I see it, that's a big part of the problem: For the last century "a writer" was always "the literary type". There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers. You wouldn't hire one of those, if you wanted to have a real, well crafted story. At least that has been a rather common prejudice for the last 100 years or so.
And now, all of a sudden (over the last 20 years), the most popular franchises, generating the most income, all turned into SF and Fantasy, while eating everything else in their path.
In that context, I don't think the current situation is all that surprising. If you want to hire "a real writer", there is a good chance that you will hit one who despises what writers were taught to despise for the last hundred years. In an unlucky twist for everyone involved, that also happens to be what they now have to write.
That just sounds like some hardcore gatekeeping and No True Scotsman bullshit to me.
I also don't think these new series writers are Boomers or Gen Xers, either. They are a bunch of young bloods with shit for brains and a lack of experience. It's not a taught hatred, but inflated egos.
But, you can ruin a sci-fi or fantasy series by hiring the completely wrong type of writer. Those last few seasons of Dr Who certainly proved that, hiring a bunch of fucking soap opera writers, oof.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=VUBP1hS8CRc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Didn't the actor who played Tyrion Lannister stand by the ending? I remember him being salty about criticisms of it. Though to be fair it must really suck to have your breakthrough role go up in flames like that. I wouldn't want to admit it either. Now I can't even remember the dude's name. He was supposed to be a beacon of hope for dwarf actors who wanted serious roles, and the role became a joke.
Maybe that, yeah, but I also remember certain interviews of him being just as passively critical about the last season as Emile Clarke was at the time. As in, he couldn't really say anything damaging (contractually), but you could tell by the reactions.
As far as dwarf actors, he really did break out into serious roles in various movies, especially in spots where his dwarfism wasn't a highlight. But, I think Hollywood just treated him as an exception, instead of changing the framing of how they cast actors, which is extremely disappointing.
Then they were quickly fired from Star Wars which is some sweet street justice.
Here's why I dno't understand, if D&D wanted to dick away so badly, why didn't the crew just, like, let them go, and bring in another director that was instead respectable and wouldn't torch the franchise and run?
Heck, it can't be that hard to come up with people who want to direct GOT. Heck, I would have done it.
But conspiracy is fun!
You give Dumb & Dumber FAR too much credit.
Nothing was calculated, other than how fast they could leave GoT for Star Wars. I'm still bitter, and at this rate, I most likely always will be.
Fuck D&D
Those clever bastards. Cheating the pirates by content enshittification.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
That they yhrew away all the rules they established before like traveling now took 0 hours and soon. All of this because the last book wasn't written yet so they had to write some story themselves and failed misserably.
HBO told the show runners(D&D) they could take as long as they wanted to finish the series. D&D had just landed jobs at the helm of a new Star Wars trilogy so they were eager to wrap up Thrones and start raking in that Disney cash. They made the last season shorter than other seasons, it sucked and they ended up losing the Star Wars deal.
Considering the star wars stuff that's been coming out, if you told me they were responsible for it, i'd believe you
Give Andor a try, thats the one show I really liked out of the stuff Ive seen so far, after that the only other show Ive been into is the Expanse(non star wars), after the first season
I can second the recommendation for Andor. Used to love Star Wars, lost all interest in it after the new trilogy (although rogue one was alright) and finally got around to watch Andor which I really loved.
Come on, Rogue One is one of the best Star Wars movies of all time.
It was a cool movie with amazing scenes and it made A New Hope make more sense (explained why the death star had a design flaw.) But I found all the characters really forgettable and it just didn't give me a satisfying emotional payoff.
::: spoiler Rogue One Spoiler
All the main characters just died and I didn't really care 🤷♂️ :::
Mando and Andor were awesome. what are you talking about? Only BOBF and that dumb Obi series sucked.
Sweet sweet justice.
As I understand it, they walked away from the Stars Wars deal to sign with Netflix to make another adaptation. One that I’m sad that they’ve hitched their names onto.
What ever happened to the D&D Star Wars trilogy?
They lost the deal for it, after how badly received the end of GoT was. Then again, the new SW trilogy managed to be shit entirely without their help.
Yeah, Disney rejected them to protect the trilogy, and then managed to completely destroy the trilogy between two and half directors, and both Disney and Lucasfilm constantly interfering with the screen writing. Episode 7 might have been derivative, but without Episode 8 kneecapping all of the plot setups, followed by Episode 9 kneecapping all of 8's plot redirections, it would have at least been fun.
I mean, being honest, the prequel trilogy was mostly not great. But it was fun enough that people still love it. The sequels are so disjointed that it's just hard to enjoy. Proof that even with all the money in the world, anyone can still fuck up.
You said it all. Episode 8 ruined everything forever. I didn't even bother trying to watch episode 9 after that, and been majorly checked out of anything SW since. The last good SW movie was Rogue One...
The worst part is some of the coolest moments of the trilogy happened in Episode 8. It could've been so good.
At any rate, Episode 9 may have been a letdown (more disappointing for what it could have been, than bad), but it's worth watching just to cap off the run. Solo was a pretty fun heist movie. I'd expected it to be terrible with the way it was being talked about and it turned out to be a solid popcorn flick. Not as good as Rogue One, but Rogue One was amazing.
At least they're taking a few years to to square things up before trying to release any more movies. Though, the strikes are probably gonna delay things even further.
I read an essay where the author argued that in the first few seasons, the GRR Martin material, World events happened and the characters were forced to adapt and react.
Once the television writers took over, the dynamic flipped so characters' actions forced the World itself to change and react, which is apparently how most television writing works since television writing revolves mostly around characters.
That's a pretty inelegant way to explain it, sorry, but I think the idea feels pretty accurate to me. There is a definite point where you can tell when the staff writers have to start plotting for themselves.
I do think that sums it up pretty well, and as other have said, the last season had a "I don't want to do this anymore, lets wrap this up vibe" and to make matters worse, they completely abandoned so many plots that you thought had a point to them. To me it felt so obvious that during the fall of kings landing, Cersi should have flipped out and Jamie should have killed her. History repeating itself. Maybe that was just too predictable for them to actually do it, but all the character development up to that point was the perfect setup for it and they just dropped it altogether.
I remember people knew the ending due to leaks about a year ahead of time and claimed it was all BS since it was so ridiculous. We were all wrong
For a secound i forgot we are talking about Game of Thrones and not Star Wars Episode 9.
I went from avoiding leaks to a few episodes in not caring and read the leaks and laughed. Then joined freefolk to laugh at the show as it aired, which made it a much less miserable affair than it would have been. A nice season long The Room roasting for the show.
Watching it straight up would have been pure torture.
A surprising amount went wrong.
While there are a sea of complaints, the biggest for me was that all of the characters stopped having internal logic. Take Jamie, he had a character arc moving from a vain knight avoiding responsibility and having an incestuous relationship with his sister, to having depth, showing that he was wracked with guilt for breaking his oath to help people. Falling in love with a woman for her character and who she was. Being responsible and honorable again. Then the last season came around and he dropped all of his growth to be with his sister.
It's like D&D decided that there would be a cool scene of him dieing with Cersi and didn't care how he got there.
It was hilarious to see Tyrion find them with a light dusting of bricks on top. Comedy.
The show reached a point where they'd surpassed where the books were in the narrative and things fell apart. The political intrigue, backstabbing, and subversive nature of the story was done away with in favour of forcing plot points through to get everything wrapped up, with no consideration made on why those characters would act in the way they did.
You could build a museum of horrible decisions and fill it with the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Whether you watched it or not, the show was a cultural touchstone, and the ending retroactively ruined everything that came before. Many shows have started well and ended poorly, but I'd argue that GoT was on pace to be an all-time top ten series, and there was absolutely nothing good to say about how it ended. Bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, sloppy editing, poor visual design, it was both rushed and too slow, and nothing made sense. If you paid someone to deliberately fuck up everything about the show, they would not have been as effective at it because it would have been obvious.
Everything
Compare it to this... Watching a highly rated chef come up with the most amazing sounding and looking dinner meal over the course of a few hours. You are anxiously awaiting to take a bite and salivating for that moment. When you finally get served your plate and get to that scrumptious first bite, the biggest wave of disappointment hits and you lose your appetite.
I don't know how else to explain it
The dish comes out and it's Spam topped with Kraft singles.
The best way to summarize it is the writing lol. And they tried to rush plot points way too fast.
And the plot points they decided to skip earlier in the season stuck out like a sore thumb. If you read the books and knew where they left off, you could see how those elements fit into the ending and made it a ton better.
The first seasons had the books with everything spelled out.
The end wasn't (still isn't) written. So the show runners were told who gets the iron throne at the end, but not how/why. Also a few other ending points.
So in the show, there's no good reason for what happens at the end. D&D just had shit happen rather than try and show why people would do that shit
Tldr; the whole 6 first season they set up the table for some really juicy stuff and in the last season, some side quests were either ignored or fast-tracked to fit in 1/3 of an episode. Realistically, you had content for at least 3+ more seasons. But since GRR Martin is so slow to write his books (I don't blame him, just pointing out the obvious), the producers of the show had to cut corner and take huge liberties that didn't make any sense
Straight up ruined character arcs
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 pirate 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.
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
Exactly
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.
Instead it was destroyed by two greedy fucks rushing the ending two seasons early so they could move on to their next cash grab flop!
Yup. Money was never a problem for D&D. HBO was willing to give them all the time and money they needed. That is a very rare thing in entertainment.
What WAS their next cash grab though?
It was supposed to be Star Wars but they messed up GoT so badly they lost the Star Wars bid.
What a shame that somebody else got the badly-messing-up-Star-Wars gig.
I believe they're doing 3 Body Problem next, another adaptation but for a Chinese sci-fi this time
That´s on my "want to read" list.
Highly recommend it, finished it earlier this year and have been blown away by how much I enjoyed the series
Its such handwaving bullshit, I wanted my money back at the end of the book.
You are aware that we are in a piracy group here, right? We don´t want our money back. Because we didn´t pay for it in the first place!
Sometimes I pirate something that is so terrible that I still feel I'm owed compensation for the time I wasted watching it and the bandwidth I used to download it.
I love those books. Good to know I won't have to watch the show.
Man, that is a very influential and popular series. They better not fuck it up!
I was gonna say lol. Damn, pirates almost spared us that ending. Too bad.
Game of Thrones was destroyed by the writers lol
The call came from inside the house!!!
The files are in the computer
I mean, theres more than a few reasons Martin hasn't finished the books. A major one being that the style of writing doesn't benefit from ending, its mostly a constant series of escalations without ever resolving anything. At a certain point no resolution will ever be satisfying.
Not saying the show ending couldn't have been better, but like shows like Lost or Heroes, or all those shows like that, no ending could ever live up to the hype generated during its run.
It was ruined before the ending.
Like Lost. They got me again!
Incredibly relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
It's been said a million times, but piracy is an accessibility issue. Chasing your favorite shows across streaming platforms is exhausting.
I've always lived by lord GabeN's "piracy is a service issue. You have to offer a better experience than the pirates"
Can we say Gabe's practice can translate to movies\shows? His products are at least 10hr worth (thus worth subscribing and enjoying an occasional sale), can be further promoted by having multiplayer, cloud saves, achievements...
It's true this old blood can't understand pirated MKVs are better than streaming-only DRMed shit. But is there anything they can really do to make their services work?
I think that it's not a problem of a service itself if it's not too shitty, but promotional campaign with memes like the one of Squid Games. One can be a Hitler of streaming platforms, but if this show is the new Lost, you'd make a bank anyway.
Once upon a time we had netflix. Almost everything you could want to watch was on there because they were just about the only show in town. During that time there was precious little reason to download most shows.
Now in order to have access to the thing you want to watch, you're expected to pay for 5 or 6 separate streaming services, by which point you end up at the same insane price point as paying for the full package of cable/PayTV channels.
They had a good thing and they ruined it with greed, just like everything else under capitalism. Glorious state streaming network should be only show in town, comrade.
I was super into piracy when I was ~12, but as Netflix took over and you could get everything you want with 2-3 subscriptions totalling <$20 per month I eventually stopped because it was easier, a much better experience, and worth the money. Now that there are too many services to count guess who has an RPi BitTorrent/Plex server? I'd prefer to go back to the old Netflix way of things as it's so much easier, but there isn't any option more convenient than my current setup.
If I could pay $50 a month and get everything I want content-wise I would, but I cannot. Not counting that half the subscription services are awful to use, or are missing major portions of series,. I've even started pirating content I pay for access to because I don't have to deal with DRM bullshit.
With Steam though I'll pirate a game, and if I like it I'll go buy it because it's a better experience. Gaben is 100% correct that you have to provide a better experience than pirates, otherwise why would anyone pay for a worse experience?
Sure, they just have to start thinking outside the box they built around themselves for once.
Here's an easy one: watch parties. You and your friends can watch the show together far away. You have integrated voice and video chat maybe, and pausing pauses for everyone.
Free shows or free teasers for shows. Not paying for a sub? You can watch the first 2 episodes of Brooklyn 99 for free, and avatar the last Airbender is free to watch or whatever.
That's not even scratching the surface. Netflix spent so much time building features that nobody uses (trivia and Minecraft story mode have almost good software behind them, why can't you do it easily with friends?), They could do something good but won't because God forbid they lose out on short term profit.
That dude is one in a billion. I am kinda scared what will become of valve once he retires or even dies. I swear to god if I lose access to my steam library I will never buy a single damn piece of media ever again.
luckily the showrunners were around to finish the job
lolz
There was a point in time when GOT was only available via an $80 a month pay tv subscription after the earlier seasons were aired on regular television. Once again, piracy is an access issue - not a theft issue.
Not only was it hard to get the subscription, but it was hard to get it in your country if you weren’t US
Canadian here. Cost us 10 or 20 bucks amonth as hbo was included in a package with other services.
Which as a canadian feels FUCKING WEIRD to brag about our telecoms for a change.
Crazy times
I don’t think that it’s reasonable to have to subscribe for one show. I know what you mean by your comment about Canadian telcos they’re dogshit.
I don’t think got was available in Australia iirc
They fail to mention that when GoT started in 2011, HBO wasn't available at all without a cable TV subscription, so people who had already dropped cable didn't have any other choice. HBO streaming without cable didn't become available until 2015.
Yeah, I don't think I'm all that special and I pirated the earlier seasons of GoT. The later seasons I watched legally, because by then it was available on a local streaming site I could well afford. If pirating wasn't an option it wouldn't have meant I would've spent the money to subscribe to a cable package that included HBO, (which would've cost a lot because you had to get some expensive bundle) I just wouldn't have watched GoT at all. So they didn't really lose anything from it.
And it's possible I may not have watched the later seasons legally either, because "eh... too late to get into this thing now."
HBO is a luxury thing and something like GoT could be the thing that'll entice people that could afford it and were thinking of getting it anyway to subscribe. The most relevant thing that influences their subscription numbers is the average income of the middle class, not piracy.
Most likely the entire HBO streaming service wouldn't have taken off, because they offered little to no avenues to consume their content to an increasingly no-cable subscription generation. It's entirely likely that HBO would've died out along with traditional TV.
TIL 2.2bn in profit is basically poverty profit, not even worth doing it ... and all because of them evil pirates who would have totally payed for Netflix if they couldn't pirate it.
However, I really loved all the memes and r/freefolk, great stuff that got exponentially better with each season.
Hell, freefolk got best when the show really started shitting the bed.
Went from funny to straight up brutally hilarious.
the bitching was better than the ending, by a large margin.
Sure. Just ask Bobby B!
(RIP BOBBY B)
GODS I WAS STRONG THEN
Tell ‘em about Bessie’s tits, your magnificence!
God, I missed this.
The cup. That was a whole thing that I completely forgot about lol
That's exactly right!
I wasn't invested in the show (it's just not my cup of soap fantasy) but I was really happy how the last two seasons turned out, my life was better for it (I was sorry for the fans but I was way too busy laughing - refreshing freefolk right after the episode aired was so much fun).
For a while there it was nigh impossible to legally get access to GOT in certain countries. Not to mention, when your only option is an insanity expensive streaming service, and the only thing you want there is one specific show, you’re likely to look for alternatives.
Legally watching HBO in Australia means supporting Rupert Murdoch.
Yeah, the only way we can get that is through Foxtel. Which is, and had always been a cable company.
Though it looks like various HBO shows are on various other streaming platforms - GoT appears to currently be on BINGE
And there are also a few on Stan and and netflix, but the vast majority of them are still locked to Foxtel.
Fun fact: Binge (and Kayo) is wholly owned by Foxtel. It's Newscorp all the way down.
Aww fuck that sucks
Not even just "certain countries", in the U S of fuckin A.
The first four seasons, arguably the best seasons, were only available to HBO subscribers. The only way to get HBO was to be a cable subscriber. So you were paying probably $100 a month to watch one show. There is NO WAY that was going to be successful. This was the rise of Netflix. I could pay $100 per year for their content. By 2014/2015 I was getting House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Bojack Horseman, it was a great time.
Now lucky for HBO Game of Thrones is a powerhouse. So what do they do in 2015? They launch HBO Now... as an iOS exclusive. I want to pay you but you cut out half your audience? Guess I'm pirating Season 5 too.
Finally by season 6 HBO Now is available for everyone. I've now watched the majority of the show by pirating it. I don't fault anyone who continued to do so. And this was the American experience. I can only imagine how other countries handled it.
Game of Thrones wasn't in jeopardy because of piracy. Game of Thrones only succeeded due to piracy. It was a fantastic show (in the early seasons) but doomed to "cancelled too soon" without piracy.
I bought it on DVD for $30 / season. It included a helpful family tree leaflet.
Same pirated the first few seasons, but bought the box sets as Christmas presents for older family members. They made their money out of me.
undefined> It included a helpful family tree leaflet.
You'd think in some instances the family tree would look more like a wreath though.
that seems like a spoiler ngl lol
Yup, I would have had to subscribe to sky for at least two years to watch it. Their weird monthly streaming service did not even include GoT and it was 720p max and it would not allow you to watch anything, if you got a 2nd monitor connected. That shit is as anti-consumer as it gets.
Bullshit. While it was the most pirated show no doubt, It did drive HBO subscriptions and BluRay sales. The drastic fall off in show quality after season 4 did it in.
Did you not read the post?
Unless the headline was being sarcastic, nowhere in the article does it explain how it was "nearly destroyed". If the article author isn't going to put any effort into writing it, why should anyone put any effort to reading it? Just the typical clickbait garbage.
The article is click bait, I agree. I'm referring to OP's post, though. Not the entire article.
Are we supposed to?
Idk there’s comments here, I was expecting to get all the relevant parts extracted for me (as I do in other posts I come across)
I remember HBO bragging that it was the most pirated show in the early seasons.
Did you guys read the post?
This is becoming a second Reddit, my answer would be no.
Complaining about this is a very reddit-esque thing to do.
Let's see... I don't provide my credit card to anyone when pirating. The only way they are getting my credit card is breaking into my house. (no, mkv files can't have viruses).
But I do need to provide my credit card info to HBO, which they store, on their likely poorly secured servers.
The number of credit cards stones from data leaks very likely exceeds the number of them stolen because someone got duped when trying to pirate.
That's not true. Though it's harder to do than your standard virus-in-an-exe.
That most likely isn't true, these sites don't store your credit card info, they leave it to the payment processors precisely because they don't want to deal with securing the data.
Exactly, they are literally trying to scare people. There is objectively a lower chance of getting your credit card stolen from pirating than getting your credit card stolen from purchasing content legally.
I'd argue it was destroyed, in the last 2 seasons.
Right around when I stopped downloading it
Agreed. I'd also argue that it would have been better if pirates managed to do the job before that.
I wasn't even able to stream it legally in Canada. The only way I could watch it legally was to get a cable subscription and a $15/mo HBO package. Fuck that!
That sounds like a contradiction.
Edit: For everyone else who doesn't bother to read the rest of the thread: it hadn't occurred to me that buying HBO doesn't include video on demand. But now I do. You don't have to tell me. I know now. What I'm saying is you don't need to tell me. Because I already know. So there's no need to tell me, for I already know.
He means one needed cable. It wasn't available purely as a stream
Oh wow, it hadn't even occurred to me such a subscription wouldn't include the ability to watch on demand. That's so last century.
So he was able to stream it legally, he just wasn't happy with the requirements for doing so.
Edited to add, I think I've misunderstood the original poster. I thought they were saying they could stream it if they had cable. Now I'm not sure that's what they meant.
For those saying I was being pedantic, I don't think it's pedantic to refute that someone said they can't do a thing when they can. But again, I think I misunderstood.
Cable isn't streaming.... 🤦♂️
The Reddit Pedantic-Olympics are starting up again…
I don’t know why internet commenters think it’s such a zing to “correct” someone when it’s quite obvious what they mean.
This isn't being pedantic, it's obvious they meant they couldn't stream it over the internet and had to watch it on scheduled cable. It's not even semantics. People just need to fully read a sentence.
It was not obvious to me at first because some on demand services require a cable TV account to access. That's what I thought they initially meant.
It is not. But GoT was not available to stream in Canada. Without any streaming options, piracy was the only way to watch... Unless of course I wanted cable and HBOs pricey package.
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.
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.
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.
asdfasfsadf
The difference is highly relevant to the discussion. They are very different ways to watch
asdfasfasdf
Actually I don't think I did.
asdfasfadf
Wow so when people admit they were mistaken you just kick em while they are down then? Must be nice to have never misread anything in your life.
asdfasfasdfasdf
Basically the experience 10+ years ago: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
There was no option to stream it in Canada. The only option to watch GoT was cable.
STREAM =/= CABLE
Thanks!
How so? There was no streaming option in Canada for GoT. HBO max was not offered. I even tried with a VPN but they wouldn't accept a Canadian credit card. So piracy was the only option unless I wanted to get cable... But who would want that.
Thanks!
It was only possible to watch GoT in the Netherlands when you were with one specific provider. That's what caused piracy.
Luckily, the writers got there first.
We were so close to saving the world from the travesty that was the last couple seasons… I weep for what shouldn’t have been.
The show was destroyed by two mediocre fuck face showrunners who were more interested in harassing the naked extras on set then running the production lol
That happened? Not being smart/snarky but I really don't follow hollywood gossip/fact/tmz/etc
Found nothing with Google, sounds made up.
I found nothing either, idk I'm going to hold out to see if someone can link something.
I'll check it out thank you!
I don't think HBO was even available in my country when GoT started. Towards the end it might've been. But you still had to also have the TV service from a specific ISP, not JUST the Internet service. Now there are more options, but it's still always bundled with some other shit you don't need.
THIS. I remember, when I started watching GoT, it was a shitshow to actually get the content in ANY way, not even speaking about getting access legally. This changed with time, but the show often was exclusive to Sky, which is one of the most garbage paid tv services I know of. I can buy it, but I REALLY don't want to support Sky for their bad service. There really should be no exclusivity to those things.
As an example, the only reason there was ever any interest in Top Gear stateside was because of piracy. In my youth, that was the only way to watch it, and it showed the BBC that there was an interest, which led to it being made available through legitimate means in the US.
Piracy isn’t about free shit.
I don't remember the band, I think it was Iron Maiden, that discovered that brazillians fucking love them by Napster data and they started touring in Brazil selling entire stadiums full even today. There's even a joke in Rio de Janeiro about how Iron Maiden visits the Barra de Tijuca area (the place where big concerts are played) more often than regular Rio's habitats.
Yes. That's Iron Maiden. They go where people are torrenting their music and sell a shit ton of tickets and merch.
literal proof that piracy leads to legal profit?
meanwhile the another band who hates pirates:
Those 24/7 Top Gear streams on justin.tv before they shut down and rebranded as Twitch turned me into a lifelong fan.
I have a prime subscription in part because is gives me access to both Top Gear and TGT.
Yeah I'd definitely agree. The amount of memes and just general sense of people buzzing about the show when it was at its peak was just unreal. And I'd argue that the fact it was being pirated and passed around so much was a big driver behind that. There's no real way to test it, but without that big cultural drive would the show have done nearly so well? My suspicion is that it wouldn't have. Not to mention all the knock-on effects such as launching the careers of many actors, who will go on to drive other hit shows etc.
Just seeing the issue as "someone watched a torrent of it so we lost the subscription fee" is extremely myopic IMO.
Damn, we should have tried harder to destroy it before Season 8 aired then. /s
i did my part.. twice
I helped several other people do their part, too. It got to a point where I actually had preloaded memes for certain points during the show that made sense. If you're familiar with both franchises you know exactly which scene it was that I played the theme from Neverending Story behind, and it was as glorious as you would imagine.
It was the most pirated series, because it was also incredibly popular.
It was incredibly popular because it was so pirated
Ye, the 2 things are pretty much connected 🤣
And I’ll fucking do it again
I couldn't be paid to rewatch the last season of GoT
It's not even available in my own country to begin with lmao.
joke's on you i've never had a credit card
If GoT had "ended" over privacy at the end of Season 7 it would still have a following. People would still wear their hair like the characters in the show... It would have created a pop culture sensation that lasted at least a generation. Now we have a funny reminder occasionally since so and so named their daughter Khaleesi in the middle of the "Breaker of Chains" season...
It's actually interesting, I've never seen something so popular ruined so quickly. For a while you heard about GoT everywhere and then those two fucks destroyed it so much that no one even wants to rewatch it.
It was a spectacular and extremely entertaining downfall.
Heres my theory. And keep in mind i have just smoked a bowl, the show runners tanked the show because martin paid them too. Create the greatest show in a generation, dont wait for the author to finish it, make everyone in the world want a good ending, and sell more books than any author has ever sold
It's really wild
The correct way to put the title is "HBO's Game of thrones was nearly destroyed by limiting access to it through high subscription costs for their platform."
Honest question.. how do you even know how many times a show was pirates? I mean the whole concept is to be de-centralized and anonymous.
The same way you know how many times a show was watched legitimately, you take a sample of known data and extrapolate it from there. It's basically guesswork but it's educated guesswork.
BitTorrent, even though it's decentralised, is still operating on the public internet using public, known protocols. You can join a swarm and get an idea of how big that swarm is with a small amount of data inspection. I mean, your torrent client knows how many seeders and leechers there are, right? Just watch the swarms and extrapolate from there.
Any time you read these articles, they're always caveated with something similar to "The number could be much higher than that" too because it's not just torrents, you've got newsgroups, file shares, streaming sites, even old school IRC, people putting titles on a USB stick and so on. Hence there's a lot of guessing, but it's not entirely plucked from thin air.
Where it does get more bullshitty is when they try to translate those numbers into lost sales. That is just made up numbers as far as I'm concerned.
That may be the point, but it doesn't mean its true. I doubt even half of the "pirates" who download shows and movies ever take the kind of precautions you'd need to to be untrackable.
Man it would be their own fault when it came to Australia, trying to watch it legally had to pay for pay TV and if you only payed for the service for the express purpose of watching GOT it worked out at $70 per episode. Fuck that.
And that's why we were the number 1 pirates of GoT by a mile!
They did a good job destroying GoT by themselves tbh.
hot take: maybe Game of Thrones should have been destroyed
I became so eager to consume the show, that I paid for NowTV so I could legally stream it much sooner than pirates ha fit available, and I'd get up an hour earlier than I needed to for work just to watch it so I didn't have it spoiled.
Damn, pirates almost saved the show??
Oh, it was nearly destroyed due to executive direction and writing
What part survived?
The hype for a prequel that isn't shit.
Yes.. that’s why made so many seasons of the show.. of course..
It was supposed to be 10. They crammed the ending into season 8 after they decided they could make more money off some other bullshit that ended up flopping. That's why the writing felt forced and the acting/production was shit and none of S8 made sense.
Pretty sure HBO was willing go to for multiple more seasons (why would they not?), but Dumb and Dumber decided to rush the ending.
Just clarifying because it looks like by they you mean HBO.
yeah, i torrented the first few seasons and subscribed myself for season 4.
making quality fucking television is how you make money, not by trying and failing to stop piracy.
Well, making something that successfully panders to an audience, at least.
Uh? You mean they didn't profit at all from the insane merchandising? Maybe they need to have a conco or two with George Lukas than, because the GoT merchandise was off the rails
I did pay for all seasons, but we could only get it legally through a horrible HBO Nordic app with insanely poor quality, so yeah I did also put in some effort in watching the series in a little more decent quality, but it’s just weird how low quality all streaming options were.
They destroyed themselves faster than the pirates ever could.
Hollywood Accounting LOL
Didn't the FTC just post new rules about sponsored content.
They should have canceled it after season 4, we all would be better without the abominations that followed.
If it's true that pircay nearly destroyed GoT, that means that we as pirates have power. We're a counter balance against ridiculous payment schemes and arbitrary limiting of content.
I wasn't able to access the show when it was around so I downloaded it. Sadly I also downloaded the last season which the show runners raped
That moment when you feel guilty about pirating something, not because of moral reasons, but because the show was so bad.
Classic bait post. Can we leave this bs on reddit?
Did you even read OP’s post? Don’t think so 😘
People only reading the headlines? That is the real typical Redditor BS here.
I read the article and it is clickbait.
Nobody is denying that the article is clickbait. The post itself isn't though. This post refutes the article.
But they make you click and engage by having a deceptive title. Which incites the rage comments, or people commenting to correct them. I also commented, so they got what they want from me too, but had to point it out at least once.
Was OP trying to bait? They used the headline from the article and even wrote a summary that explained the article.
Good.
I would add the title of 'Most pirated series, but do to the utterly shit ending, also the most regrettable."
More and more people are choosing pirated video sites because they want free services. This is indeed something unstoppable. Just like this article, everyone is very concerned about where to watch harry potter movies for free.
Great post, thanks.
HBO has repeated this policy for decades. Shared passwords and piracy drive long term retention. If your company is thinking long term, all that matters is raw content quality, which HBO has always dominated.
The new fuckhead in charge is fixing that. HBO, (or now officially Max because Cinemax was always HBO’s trailer park cousin,) is in the enshittification wringer.
Radio stations in the US don't have to pay artists for playing their works for money. They claim that this provides free advertising which increases record sales.
Not sure why this works for music and not other forms of media.
That's false. ASCAP/BMI/SESAC is there so stations are obligated to pay artists for use of their work. Radio stations are supposed to submit playlists to them to calculate mechanical royalties.
There is a lot of fuckery afoot and these rules aren't enforced, but stations are supposed to pay artists for their work when they use it
I’m not one to defend giant media conglomerates, but to compare radio broadcasts - which are not on-demand for the consumer - to downloaded content (which is) is kind of silly. People also tend to listen to a song/album repeatedly and thus want to own it and have it on hand. Most people who watch a show as long as GoT don’t watch it again.
Not so long ago we had video broadcasts, akin to radio, which was called « television » I think…. Yet it was generally not free either.
Television was free. Network TV was broadcasted out for free and the shows were paid for by sponsors running ads. Then we invented cable and got double-charged for them providing the content AND we still got ads.
HDTV is still free with an antenna in the US
The US is one of four countries in the world - including Iran, China, and North Korea - that doesn't force radio stations to pay artists royalties for using their music to make money. Seeding a torrent doesn't even make money.
Most people don’t rewatch movies or shows like they do with music. And how often do people, who want to rewatch a show, actually buy the dvd or BluRay once they’ve seen it trough a pirated source that still sits on their hard drive?
Also artists do get paid when a song gets played on the radio. It’s called radio royalties, though only the people that have writing credits get paid.
Here is an article that talks about how artists get paid for radio play. Not sure why you'd think they do not. The basics are:
The songwriter is paid the royalties due