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.
Dumb and Dumber’s only talent was adapting the books really well
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.
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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.
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
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.
What ever happened to the D&D Star Wars trilogy?
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.
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.
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 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.
Ensure its released globally at the same time
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/...
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
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!
What a shame that somebody else got the badly-messing-up-Star-Wars gig.
I love those books. Good to know I won't have to watch the show.
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
is there anything they can really do to make their services work?
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.
luckily the showrunners were around to finish the job
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
mkv files can’t have viruses
That's not true. Though it's harder to do than your standard virus-in-an-exe.
which they store, on their likely poorly secured servers
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.
Did you not read the post?
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.
Complaining about this is a very reddit-esque thing to do.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Found nothing with Google, sounds made up.
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.
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.
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 incredibly popular because it was so pirated
And I’ll fucking do it again
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh, it was nearly destroyed due to executive direction and writing
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
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.
They destroyed themselves faster than the pirates ever could.
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.
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.
People only reading the headlines? That is the real typical Redditor BS here.
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.
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.
Radio stations in the US don't have to pay artists for playing their works for money
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.
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:
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
Good thing they were fast enough to destroy it with the shittiest last season ever.
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