It's fascinating to watch how much opportunity they are throwing out of the door.

According to blog monitoring service blogs.yandex.ru, Game of Thrones is third most discussed TV series in Russian speaking countries right now. Obviously a huge number of people watch it from various of sources: original torrents, translated torrents, streaming... But HBO gets exactly zero from this. They just don't want anybody's money. They do nothing.

I'm sure they want it. But as any Game of Thrones watcher knows, the alliances that you make in the pursuit of power and wealth mean you can't always do what you want. Yet.

As any Game of Thrones watcher should always remember:

While you're busy fighting for power and wealth, somebody is eating your lunch at the same time.

Instead of fighting for the share of wealth, you should perhaps figure out a way of making more wealth or at least preserving it.

Hodor.

The funny thing is because they just made it more difficult for people who are paying good money to subscribe to their service, they may well have driven a whole bunch of people to cancel their subscription and go down the illegal route because it is so much easier, and cheaper than buying a new cable box! Crazy!

Err.. I agree with you on principal, but "most people"? I'd wager that not even a majority of people who watch HBO content do so by resorting to copyright infringement.

If they don't pull their heads out though, that number will continue to increase. It's not as if piracy involves a great deal of mental capacity or even difficulty.

How to legally watch Game of Thrones: 1) Turn on the TV. 2) Change channel to HBO. 3) DONE.

That is infinitely easier for most of the population than downloading a torrent; it takes at most 4 button presses. If your TV is too old to handle the new content protection scheme, buy a new TV. If you can afford HBO, you can afford a new TV.

The type of people who would prefer to download the show via torrent are generally the type of people who wouldn't pay for HBO to begin with, so HBO doesn't care about the mythical money to be made off them.

> How to legally watch Game of Thrones: 1) Turn on the TV. 2) Change channel to HBO. 3) DONE.

Yeah, except for 2 not being an option for about 95% of the planet.

oops.

Thankfully torrents are an equal-opportunity distribution channel I guess.

Looking at how many people buy music on iTunes because it is convenient and assuming they would buy the video if it was also available, means that you are very, very incorrect.

And the nonsence about if you can afford x, you can afford y. No, that is not a given. I can afford one luxury and just because your priority would be given to luxury A does not mean that I give A the same priority.

Anyway it is a moot point. HBO is not available outside the states.

It is ... (see my post up in this thread), but with the same restrictions (well, maybe even worse, because it's available only at one provider).

This is total BS, at least in my case.

1. I refuse to pay for premium Comcast at 2x the price of my very nice Internet connection just to get one channel. 2. I am very happy to pay $8/mo to Netflix. 3. I'm also very happy to buy LOTS of physical media; I own over 600 titles on DVD or Blu-Ray, and counting. Many of these titles, I have bought two, three, or even four times in different contexts (DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes, etc.) 4. I'm also happy to pay for all of HBO, even though I don't really want to watch all of HBO.

I just don't want to give money to my local cable monopoly, a lot of money, when I only want about 3% of the content they insist on bundling together.

I really don't think I'm the bad guy here.