Three seasons in and Game of Thrones still continues to set records -- both legitimate and otherwise. After hitting ratings milestones earlier this year, it now has yet another accomplishment to boast about: the most pirated show of 2013.
This latest honor comes via TorrentFreak, which found that the Season 3 finale of the show had 5.9 million downloads via BitTorrent, beating other shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead by large margins. However, the fact that millions of people are pirating Game of Thrones really isn't the story here -- or, if it is, it's not a new one. What bears examining is the extent to which that piracy is a direct product of HBO's policies -- and the network's staunch refusal to budge in the face of mounting evidence that their policy of avoiding third-party distribution to reinforce the value of their product is accomplishing just the opposite.
It's not that HBO doesn't acknowledge the volume of torrenting taking place. In fact, in August Jeff Bewkes, CEO of HBO parent Time Warner, called out piracy as "better than an Emmy" for stimulating interest in Game of Thrones and increasing the number of legitimate HBO subscriptions. Yet statements like that demonstrate that they don't really seem to get how -- or why -- piracy is happening, or their role in that.
For the last decade evidence has mounted that, while some measure of media piracy is inevitable, it thrives on inconvenience: given the means, viewers will generally pay for a legitimate source, but only if they can get to it more easily than an illegal one. That's the backbone of services like iTunes and Netflix: making those transactions easy and, critically, fast.
PiracyData.com, which tracks piracy statistics for movies, has found that the list of most-pirated movies in any given week have one factor overwhelmingly in common: There's no way to legally stream them. That's a more complicated conversation when applied to the established theatrical-release-home-release structure of movies. Television, on the other hand, is designed to be watched in the convenience of your home, and the success it's found by way of streaming services reflects that. They give us a more convenient, selective way to interact with media in much the same way we would anyway.
With a show like Game of Thrones, the impetus to piracy is twofold. First, access: as Matthew Inman recently illustrated at The Oatmeal, unless you subscribe to HBO, there's no legal way to get to Game of Thrones before it's out on DVD; and in an age where á la carte viewership is becoming more of a norm, the idea of subscribing to an entire channel for one show seems ludicrous. Second, timeliness: conversations around entertainment have moved from the water cooler to the internet. Given the global conversation around each new episode of Game of Thrones, the week-long lag between domestic and international release is an inexcusable offset. (This lag could also explain why TorrentFreak found more than half of those season finale downloads happened in the first week after the show aired.) Even notwithstanding spoilers, viewership in the age of social media has become a social experience; it's access to that experience as much as access to the show itself that spurs downloading.
This is the reality of the river that HBO is riding. The question isn't whether viewers will continue to download Game of Thrones, it's whether HBO will ever be smart enough to stop throwing away money fighting the tide.
