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.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
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.
That they threw 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 miserably.
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.
get your credit card stolen.
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.
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.
