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

  • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net
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    1 year ago

    That they threw 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 miserably.

    • WookieMunster@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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

      • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Bucket_of_Truth@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Considering the star wars stuff that’s been coming out, if you told me they were responsible for it, i’d believe you

        • variants@possumpat.io
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          1 year ago

          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

          • pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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.

              • pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                It was a cool movie with amazing scenes and it made A New Hope make more sense (explained why the death star had a design flaw.) But I found all the characters really forgettable and it just didn’t give me a satisfying emotional payoff.

                Rogue One Spoiler

                All the main characters just died and I didn’t really care 🤷‍♂️

      • idle@158436977.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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.