Last year, Game of Thrones was one of the most pirated shows on peer to peer file sharing networks. As new regulations for warning consumers who torrent copyrighted material are put into place by cable companies, a director for Thrones says that maybe the whole file sharing things isn’t that big a deal.
Speaking at a writers’ festival at the University of Western Australia, David Petrarca — who directed the season-two Thrones episodes “The Ghost of Harrenhal” and “Garden of Bones” — said all those illegal downloads don’t matter much, so long as “cultural buzz” keeps propelling the show’s popularity.
“That’s how they [shows] survive,” Petrarca said.
Some episodes of Thrones have been downloaded more than four million times. However, last week the box set for season two set on both DVD and Blu-Ray set records, according to EW. And last year saw a huge spike in ratings and many expect this year to deliver even higher ratings.
So, is Petrarca right? Let us know what you think.
Clearly pirating doesn’t impede on sales as much as people think. Afterall, why else would the most downloaded film in history also be the highest grossing one.
On the other hand, they do still need viewings for the adverts. But they’ll get those from people who want to watch it as early as possible, which is all of them.
To be honest it sounds just like the same song and dance we heard from the music business a number of years ago?
“oh no illegal sharing is killing our business” at the same time CD sales were up…
And your point on the viewings/adverts… that is why I don’t mind minimal adds for recent streaming content (hulu?)
There are two shows I ever pirated, this and Doctor Who, and the only reason I did it was because I had no other way of getting them. With HBO, it was a case of “Please take my money”, but they wouldn’t let me sign up for their streaming service. With Doctor Who, it was because my cable service didn’t include BBC America. Does this mean I’m just “not good enough”? Do I have to pay my cable company $100+ per month just for these two shows? No thanks. I’ll just download them now, and buy the disks when they’re available.
For the longest time, some TV series were only available as torrents. Ages ago, I bought the first half of American Gothic on laserdisc, a grossly expensive Japanese import because it wasn’t available anywhere else, but because the series was canceled after one season, they never produced the second half. So I resorted to “alternative methods” to find the off-air TV shows I’d wanted to watch again.
But when those shows came out on DVD (American Gothic, Action, Profit, a few others), I bought those DVD sets and deleted the files from my system, and I can’t tell you how many VHS tapes I wore out watching Robin of Sherwood before that series made it to DVD.
There are a couple of other shows out there that aren’t on DVD yet, that I wouldn’t mind being able to watch again someday… and they are old enough that they have never been available through alternate means, that I know of… another Fox series called Strange Luck, an old CBS series called The Others, and the Nickelodeon reboot of The Tomorrow People (which by all good sense should be making tracks to DVD, what with the new CW reboot in pre-production).
And there’s plenty of stuff out there that lots of us would pay money for if they were available (Sinbad’s “Brain Damaged” HBO special, the MTV Unplugged Melissa Etheridge show where Bruce Springsteen came out to perform an acoustic Thunder Road with her, for example).
Thank you! With everyone talking about the original Tomorrow People I was starting to think I was dreaming that there had been a version on Nick… much more kid friendly I believe.
Nope, your memory is correct. Set in England, just like the original, but the mothership was buried on some tropical island, and when a new kid’s talents were awakened, that’s where they teleported to (don’t think they called it “jaunting” in that version).
I think it ran three seasons, but was exec produced by the same guy who did the original show, Roger Price. I really wish that were out on DVD, or at least planning to come out. Maybe I should drop a note to the TVShowsOnDVD.com people and see if they know anything…