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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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’s really wild
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Then they were quickly fired from Star Wars which is some sweet street justice.
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.
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.
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.
Those clever bastards. Cheating the pirates by content enshittification.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
Straight up ruined character arcs
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.
Everything
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.
deleted by creator
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
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.
For a secound i forgot we are talking about Game of Thrones and not Star Wars Episode 9.
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.
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…
Sweet sweet justice.
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.
Mando and Andor were awesome. what are you talking about? Only BOBF and that dumb Obi series sucked.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Oh come on you know what he meant
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.
The difference is highly relevant to the discussion. They are very different ways to watch
asdfasfasdf
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.
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!
STREAM =/= CABLE
Thanks!
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.
And I’ll fucking do it again
I couldn’t be paid to rewatch the last season of GoT
Damn, pirates almost saved the show??
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.
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.
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
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:
- Radio acquires a blanket license(s) from its local PRO(s)
- A song is played on a radio, and the airplay is reported to a PRO
- The PRO distributes royalties and songwriter gets paid
The songwriter is paid the royalties due
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.
Good.
Classic bait post. Can we leave this bs on reddit?
Was OP trying to bait? They used the headline from the article and even wrote a summary that explained the article.
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.
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
movies can get your credit card stolen
joke’s on you i’ve never had a credit card
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
