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| © Blythe T |
After the show had aired in the US so many people downloaded the
BitTorrent illegally, they broke the record for the largest BitTorrent swarm. A
few hours later, 163,088 people where sharing a single torrent, 110,303 were
sharing a complete copy of that torrent and 52,786 were still downloading. Torrent
Freak estimates that, combined with other released torrents, the Game of
Thrones episode has been downloaded over a million times a day since it was
released in the US.
Torrent
Freak says that "these are mind
boggling numbers that we've never seen before."
Had the television show been aired globally at the same time as in
the US the makers of the show might have seen less pirating of their content.
However Torrent Freak notes that 12.9% of the piracy in this instance occurred in
the US, because HBO is a subscription based channel. The UK was the next
biggest offender, with 11.5% of infringers, followed closely by Australia,
Canada and France.
Interestingly back in February of this year, David Petrarca,
director of Game of Thrones said
that he wasn't too worried about illegal downloads, because shows like Game
of Thrones thrive on their "cultural buzz" and capitalise on the
social commentary that they generate. He went on to say that as HBO has 26
million subscribers in the US and 60 million worldwide, there was plenty of
money filtering in and allowing the channel to produce high quality content
despite any illegal downloading.
The writer of Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, said
in March: "We are the most
pirated show in the world. In a strange way that's a compliment." He went
on to talk about the fact that because the market place is now global, time
lapses between release dates in the US and other countries can lead to piracy,
but concluded "I leave this to the
guys in the suits and the guys with the really big computers who understand
that stuff and they can figure out the business models. I'll just tell my
stories."
What do readers think? Should broadcasters take
responsibility for reducing piracy by releasing content simultaneously, or
should television shows see piracy as a "compliment", enabling them
to sell more merchandise?
2 comments:
Maybe it is similar in one way with library users (though what they are doing is legal!) vs book buyers. Some author (the horrible man who wrote the horrible stories, sorry cannot lose my time in searching for his name) was moaning about the fact he was losing money because of libraries... do library users never buy books? I know I do both: borrow from my public library and buy the latest book in Blackwell's or Waterstones. Piracy will always happen, and also for films... but people do also, from time to time go to the cinema theatre because nothing compares with the big screen and going out with friends.
This highlights the point that, at some point, revenues and payments become sufficient and you don't need to monetize every use.
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