Game of Thrones The Most Pirated TV Show of the Season 312
TheGift73 sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"With nearly 4 million downloads per episode, the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is the most pirated TV-show of the season. Worldwide hype combined with restricted availability are the key ingredients for the staggering number of unauthorized downloads. How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory complete the top three, albeit with significantly fewer downloads than the chart topper. ... While there are many reasons for people to download TV-shows through BitTorrent, airing delays and HBO's choice not to make it widely available online are two of the top reasons."
In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Game of Thrones, one of the best selling TV shows on blu-ray.
Big shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
The oatmeal covers this pretty well. [theoatmeal.com] When people complain and are waving money at you and you don't want to take it, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Yes, people are pirating game of thrones.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does it matter? Haven't we had enough discussions on this particular topic?
Buffering issues (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't think of any online TV show viewers that buffer the video in any appreciable way. Downloading the show via BitTorrent is pretty much the only way to guarantee the show can be watched on a slow connection, or, in the case of HD video, viewed at all without constant underruns.
Re:Big shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
When a large mass of people are willing to pay, but you choose to limit the market to a much smaller mass just so that you can charge more, that's the definition of artificial scarcity.
If not artificial scarcity then what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't get enough ad impressions last time? (Score:5, Insightful)
We've had a 1000+ post flamewar over this not even a month ago.
Re:Big shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why television's channel package business model is doomed. The average cable customer only watches about a dozen channels; the rest of their cable bill goes to subsidize the other 138 channels. Cable TV is increasingly seen as not worth the cost.
If we could get a la carte programming, cable costs would plummet... those dozen channels would total about $20/month. But so would the number of channels, most of which couldn't survive without their current subsidies. Every cable and studio executive will proclaim to be a "free market guy", except in cases like this.
Re:If not artificial scarcity then what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The price of early access (Score:1, Insightful)
Or they could realize the world changed, I'll pirate it, and maybe buy the DVD if I still feel like it when they finally decide to *let* me pay them.
They don't seem to want my money. I'm okay with that. Keep shilling or whatever the hell you're doing though.
Re:Who should set prices, and why? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a right, it's a simple business practice called Price elasticity of Demand [wikipedia.org].
In a nutshell, the lower the price of something the more demand there will be. It's not necessarily a linear graph (i.e. 10 people will pay $100 but 100 people will pay $10) and it varies depending on the product, what time of year it is, the market in general etc. but the principal is always the same.
In this case, all people want is the ability to pay for just the standalone service that they want rather than having to buy bundles of crap they don't need.
I'm not even from the US, I can't get "HBO" and I support this philosophy - I have 165 TV channels due to my provider's "packages" and I find myself switching between about the same 10 or 15 in the average week, some of which are free to air anyway.
To make matters worse, with my current provider there is absolutely no way I can watch Game of Thrones, no matter how much money I throw at them - they don't have the channel that shows it, only one provider does and its exclusive to them and only them (for those wonder, I live in the UK, use Virgin Media for their broadband and Sky Atlantic is the Channel that shows Game of Thrones, which Sky refuses to share with Virgin).
To use an analogy, you want to buy a music track. That music track is part of an album of 12 other songs, most of which are terrible and 1 or 2 are maybe "listenable". Not only this, but there's only one music service that sells this album and it's not compatible with your current MP3 player.
You COULD buy a new mp3 player, switch to the new music service (or carry multiple devices) and spend 5x more than the one song is actually worth OR just download the MP3 of the song illegally.
Re:Who should set prices, and why? (Score:4, Insightful)
They let you PAY WHAT YOU WANT, because they realize if you give them $1, that's $1 of profit, and is better than 0. Each person pays what they can afford, what they feel is an appropriate value.
What happened? Did everybody choose 0? Nope, they made millions. They're printing money.
Shit isn't rocket science, guys. Get over your damn egos and accept that this is the cost of doing business.
"You want us to sell the TV show our blood, sweat, and tears went into for $1?!?"
Yes, Yes I do. And you'll make millions, so shush.
Shooting themselves in the foot right now.
Re:Big shock... (Score:4, Insightful)
What you would find, is that all the mass market shows would condense onto a small number of channels, and any niche programming would simply be cut entirely. Do you really want to see non stop reality shows on 10 channels, with nothing else available to watch?
Re:Who should set prices, and why? (Score:4, Insightful)
How it is possible to not watch, when all social media are abuzz? All friends, colleagues are talking about it??
That's the whole point/problem of the current media model: they try to earn money by abusing part of human nature, which is to share an experience. That's also why the models are guaranteed to never last long: they are against the human nature.
Re:Who should set prices, and why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Crap. This is a classic argument that falls down. Let me spell it out for you.
Your argument: The customer can:
The reality: The customer can:
Yes. There are some people who will pirate something regardless of what you do. The reality is that most people, given the opportunity to get something good in a form they want for a reasonable price will jump on it (Steam, Good old Games, Louis C.K., etc... have proved this). Most of those that do end up pirating are kids who probably couldn't afford it anyway (who later become paying fans), or people who wouldn't pay for it whatever. I'm not saying there are not sales lost to piracy, but there are far, far more lost to giving us content in a rubbish way for too much. Inconvinience us and of course we'll take it for free without the inconvinience. Not only that, but you are giving people a way to justify it to themselves morally.
Re:Who should set prices, and why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, you hit the nail right on the head there...
Media is marketed in such a way so as to put a lot of pressure on people to watch it, and make them feel bad if they haven't seen it while all their friends have. People who have not seen the latest shows are stigmatised as being "out of touch".
If you do this, and then don't provide a method by which people can actually buy the content, then they will have no recourse but to pirate it.
It's also now common to have friends in different countries, thanks to the internet... So the old model of releasing content significantly later in different countries becomes extremely damaging too... When participating in multinational forums on the internet, you are considered to be behind the times, from a backwater and looked down upon if you have to wait 6 months to see the shows everyone else is watching.