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
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:
Dating myself quite a bit but I didn’t know what the hell the Sopranos where as they were getting awards that first season. I would see the gun logo and yet another award for a show we couldn’t see in Canada at all in those days. I was like what the hell is this show? I wasn’t alone and many snowbirds knew what the show was from their travels south into the US.
The inability for Canadians to buy HBO to watch this latest hot show drove the Gray market satellite sales in Ontario at first then the rest of Canada. Early on there was a ruling that Canadians couldn’t steal what they can’t buy. Everyone was going down into the US to buy Dish and Direct TV satellites from the various US department stores to get their HBO. Some were going down with trailers and buying as many as they could to sell back home in Canada.
Then there was 2 groups. The early ones that were able to subscribe to buy their US satellite programming and then those that were hacking the smart card signals. The first group were shutdown once they limited it to US credit cards and addresses only.
For the later group which many had become, it was great early on as you could buy your own satellite card programmer and then receive updates via email or websites after the latest ECM had gone through to wipe out the last programming hack. It was a real back and forth in those days.
Many just wanted pay for HBO to watch the Sopranos. Many ended up with all the TV, pay per view, movies, and lame US porn they could get for free.
It was the first serious wave of people cutting the cord for a time there. Why pay for Canadian TV when you could get so much US TV for free? Then many realized they could use the same US system hacks to get Canadian TV for free with much better porn as they were the same SAT systems with Canadian labels.
Eventually the Canadian providers were able to get the legal ruling they wanted to make selling US systems black market. Supply dried up with many no longer bringing back the sats systems across the border especially after 9/11. Eventually the department stores stopped selling the systems without signing up for a subscription like a cellphone today. Then the smart cards used changed along with the move from standard quality to HD systems.
It was a crazy and fun way to ride the pirate seas back then and much of it driven by the inability to legally buy a subscription to HBO in Canada in those days.
Things got to a pretty sweet spot there again in a legal way with Netflix but that’s all been destroyed with the fragmentation of streaming services and now properties being taken offline completely if they don’t perform great right out of the gate. It’s pushing many of the old hackers to ride the seas again in new ways especially in Canada as it seems more shows are geolocked due to inability to buy access to US programming again with the fragmentation of the online services.
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.