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Game of Thrones was nearly "destroyed" by pirates illegally streaming HBO content
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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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They fail to mention that when GoT started in 2011, HBO wasn't available at all without a cable TV subscription, so people who had already dropped cable didn't have any other choice. HBO streaming without cable didn't become available until 2015.
Yeah, I don't think I'm all that special and I pirated the earlier seasons of GoT. The later seasons I watched legally, because by then it was available on a local streaming site I could well afford. If pirating wasn't an option it wouldn't have meant I would've spent the money to subscribe to a cable package that included HBO, (which would've cost a lot because you had to get some expensive bundle) I just wouldn't have watched GoT at all. So they didn't really lose anything from it.
And it's possible I may not have watched the later seasons legally either, because "eh... too late to get into this thing now."
HBO is a luxury thing and something like GoT could be the thing that'll entice people that could afford it and were thinking of getting it anyway to subscribe. The most relevant thing that influences their subscription numbers is the average income of the middle class, not piracy.
Most likely the entire HBO streaming service wouldn't have taken off, because they offered little to no avenues to consume their content to an increasingly no-cable subscription generation. It's entirely likely that HBO would've died out along with traditional TV.