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Premiere of final Game of Thrones season triggers piracy bonanza
- Thread starter Deleted member 15428
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You can get Sky Atlantic via Now TV for literally pennies.
On Sky Now TV which is £8 per month and shit. An absolute piss take for people already paying for Virgin for example like me.
You would only need to subscribe for a month to see all of S8.
Sky ticket allows you to stream at 720p only! (No reason for piracy, but unacceptable in 2019).
Portuguese HBO streaming service delivered the episode 70 minutes late because the service had technical issues the moment all the people got on to watch at 2am. Lots of people on social media saying they will not renew for 5€ (after the free month most of them are on) and will just pirate stream the next episodes..
Yup, whereas pirates experienced extremely smooth playback with no buffering/lag, good bitrate, 1080p and surround sound. Pirates in Canada literally received a better GoT experience than paying Crave TV subscribers.
Yeah and the quality is absolute rubbish 720p with awful sound.
Can't blame people for pirating high quality copies when the only paid version available to them is completely unacceptable quality wise.
Give me a high quality 1080p service that streams it and I'll pay for it.
Err, what Sky contract did you have that cost over a hundred pounds a month? It' was nowhere near that, unless you opt for nearly every available package. I had it at the time and it was only costing £40-50.
Shitty quality? Most of the GoT torrents are in 720/1080p. HBO now is not available everywhere, people need to get out of this mindset.
GoT is the most pirated show of all time. Something can be a success and still pirated that doesn't make piracy ok.
I'm not defending piracy, as I watch Game of Thrones at a friend's house and she has HBO, but goddamn HBO GO didn't work live for the entirety of season 7 here in Brazil and the same thing happened again with the season 8 premiere. How can you expect people to pay R$35/month to watch GoT legally if your service doesn't work as intended/advertised? Two hours before the episode went live the servers were already down. It's ridiculous.
I think the idea was for At&t to sell phone service for free HBO access, but they couldn't work it out in time
Only 720p Stereo available here so fuck off I'll get the 1080 5.1 version for free, yarrr.
If HBO wants my money stop allowing companies like sky to sham people out of money for shit quality and offer hbo now everywhere.
If HBO wants my money stop allowing companies like sky to sham people out of money for shit quality and offer hbo now everywhere.
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GOT is the most successful show of current times, piracy is easier than ever while accessibility isn't in large part of the world.
To put it in more simpler terms, if your opinion was in anyway true, services like Spotify, Netflix, Steam or Apple Music wouldn't be thriving since they're more often than not converting pirates and/or people not buying content.
Ehhh, as a former "pirate", the community and piracy advocates that just enjoy getting it for free will continue to do so. 8 years it ago it was just a different excuse as it is now. 8 years ago it was "just give me the OPTION of streaming and I'll gladly pay!". Now that you can, the excuse is the quality of audio and sound, or the price.
I mean, some entire countries literally can't even access the series. I get your point tho. Pirates gonna pirate.
Honestly I can say with confidence that a large chunk of these people who pirate the show, don't have any legal access to it.
I for example didn't have any legal mean to watch the show in my country until season six came out. Now there is a streaming service that puts up the episodes in the same time as everywhere, for 2.99$ a month only.
There is no justification for piracy whatsoever, but it is kinda on the company if it doesn't get its content accessible everywhere.
I for example didn't have any legal mean to watch the show in my country until season six came out. Now there is a streaming service that puts up the episodes in the same time as everywhere, for 2.99$ a month only.
There is no justification for piracy whatsoever, but it is kinda on the company if it doesn't get its content accessible everywhere.
As a former "pirate everything" who had most of my family do it too, and that was for everything ( from games to series/movies manga, anime ), I saw literaly everyone in my family and friends convert to netflix when it came to France.
What they did not do, is convert to netflix + 3-4 other subscription services. At best Amazon Prime, but that was usually because of the 'free' 24h delivery, not their video content.
I mean I pay for Sky and I am able to watch it there, but I still got the episode at work in 1080p which was such a massiv difference in quality that I will do the same with the following episodes. Sky Go is such a shit show.
I"m not arguing the quality is too bad for you to consume or fine as it is. All I'm saying that the reasons people use to pirate game of thrones continues to change as access changes.
This conversation is about the UK. GOT is also available in 1080, as a simulcast with the US. That poster is just unwilling to pay for it.
I ended up subscribing to our ISP's (Ziggo) shitty expanded service just to be able to watch it. But, the image quality was definitely shitty. I suspect 720p at best.
Pretty much this. I tried subscribing to the service here in Taiwan but I'm locked out. I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime and what have you so it's a real bummer because I happily pay for my content.
In this case I just wait for the complete series on iTunes (and have rented previous seasons from local rental stores in the meantime).
We had HBO as part of our cable TV package but episodes were fucking censored. Even knife stabs were blurred out. So strange.
Sure, but people's reasons also change with time. 8 years ago the expectations for paid streaming content weren't as high as they are now.
If the file size is 3.3GB .mkv for a 60 minute episode, that quality is likely better than the bitrate most cable companies provided.
It's a shame that pirated files end up being superior to the quality fed to us by expensive cable and satellite subscriptions.
It's a shame that pirated files end up being superior to the quality fed to us by expensive cable and satellite subscriptions.
The only way to get HBO Now here is to change ISP... To someone who can't even deliver to my area. Fantastic. The locked the subscription behind a fucking Internet subscription from a specific ISP.
What?! I could swear it was 1080p. Well, it looked great anyways so I'm happy lol
Definitely, I did feel like the on air live version of it was better than when I was doing my catch up.
There's usually always a way to legally obtain something, but people don't want to because it usually costs money
I watched it through adding HBO to Hulu and the quality was pretty abysmal at times; it would buffer down to like 480P, which in dark scenes, is basically unwatchable with the black crush. I don't know if that's a Hulu issue or Hulu farms out the HBO content to come off HBO's own servers, but it is shocking how big a gulf there was between that and your average Netflix or Amazon presentation.
I ponied up for HBO Now because I'm old now and don't wanna stay up late to watch it after it has aired. :(
Game of Thrones season premiere pirated 54 million times in a day
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https://torrentfreak.com/game-of-thrones-season-premiere-pirated-54-million-times-in-a-day-190417/'Game of Thrones Season Premiere Pirated 54 million Times in a Day'
Data published by piracy monitoring firm MUSO suggests that the season opener of Game of Thrones was pirated 54 million times in the first 24 hours. Unauthorized streaming services were most used, while torrent downloads were good for roughly ten percent of the total. Most pirates come from India, followed by China and the United States.
As usual, the torrent download figures quickly ran into the millions. However, little is known about the traffic that goes to web-based streaming portals, which have outgrown traditional file-sharing sites in recent years.
One of the main problems is that it's impossible for outsiders to know exactly how many visitors pirate streaming services get. Traffic data for these sites are not public, which makes it difficult to put an exact figure on the number of views one particular video has.
According to MUSO, the premiere episode of the seventh season of Game of Thrones has been pirated more than 54 million times during the first day alone. This massive number is largely driven by streaming websites.
For comparison, HBO's official, or legitimate, viewing numbers add up to just 17.4 million.
The data reveals that online streaming sites accounted for 76.6% of all pirate views, followed by web downloads at 12.2%. Public torrent sites were good for another 10.8% and private torrent sites close the row with 0.5%.
MUSO's finding are partly based on data from SimilarWeb, which uses a sample of roughly 200 million 'devices' to estimate website traffic. Website visits are then seen as "downloads or view," and the sample data is extrapolated into the totals. Whether people actually saw the full episode is unknown.
In addition to the pirate numbers and sources, MUSO also revealed the top countries where the Game of Thrones premiere was accessed. India is in the lead here with 9.5 million pirate hits, followed by China and the US with 5.2 and 4 million respectively.
The top ten of countries with the most Game of Thrones pirates is completed by the UK, Nigeria, Iran, Kenya, France, Canada, and Australia, as seen below.
For years my wife and I literally had no way to watch the show without pirating it. We would always buy the season when it finally released but we weren't going to sit around waiting to get spoiled. HBO need to have a better way of distributing internationally. We would have loved loved loved to give them money for HBO Now.
Now that we live in France we can get HBO so there's no torrenting for us this season but they really should have sorted it out by now.
Now that we live in France we can get HBO so there's no torrenting for us this season but they really should have sorted it out by now.
I would say those numbers are very conservative. Or at least way bigger after a few days.