The Hobbit and Game of Thrones Top Most Pirated Lists of 2013

DavidGilbert99 writes "Fantasy fans are clearly among the most prevalent downloaders of pirated material if the 2013 lists of most pirated films and TV shows is anything to go by. The Hobbit beat Django Unchained and Fast and Furious 6 while on TV, Game of Thrones saw off competition from Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead as the most pirated TV show. While this is clearly losing money for both industries, the US box office doesn't seem to be suffering too much as it is about to record its best year ever."

Re:Bullshit

[Kjella]

Because in the US they want to be the middle man for others, they want to use HBO original series as the hook to get people subscribing to HBO so they can sell network time. In the nordic countries we have HBO Nordic which is a pure Internet solution similar to HBO Go, funny thing is that I subscribe but I still use my one-stop torrent shop to watch those shows as well.

Re:Clearly losing money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I get probably 85% of my content legitimately. I pay for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and a few other services. I own a roku. But some content I can't get without full on cable subscriptions. For those I hit the torrent sites.

I'd gladly pay to get a season of game of thrones, boardwalk empire, etc as it was released in 1080p that was playable via plex or my roku. Just like music, once I could get the content in a unencumbered form I stopped 'stealing' my music.

That said, there is also a lot of pirated content that is never viewed. For example. I watched the first season of GoT. I kept my rss feeder downloading GoT though all the remaining seasons, yet I've not yet watched it. Recently I was gifted the first 3 seasons of GoT on blueray so I deleted those downloads. I believe a lot of piracy works this way, large scripts that download content the script owner thinks he/she wants, but never actually consumes. I've deleted tons of crap I thought I'd like, downloaded entire seasons, watched 10 minutes and deleted the whole thing.

Re: Clearly losing money?

[JudgeFurious]

I "pirate" a lot of media. It's a mixed bag really and not all of it is just completely freeloading. Example: I download rips of movies I already own on DVD/BR. I'm lazy and it's quicker than ripping it myself. Some of the guys who do this are excellent at keeping as much quality as possible while getting a smaller file footprint. I have no talent for this so why bother? I download music that I own on a variety of formats. I'm not going to re-buy digital content. If I own an old scratchy LP I feel no shame in downloading perfect mp3 files of the material. I also download movies that I skipped at the theater because I thought they'd suck. From time to time I pay for a good one on BR after the fact but more often than not I don't. The reason I responded to you though was your mention of a "free trial". When it started I downloaded Game of Thrones and got hooked pretty quickly. It's a good show. More importantly though my wife got hooked on it. We now subscribe to HBO which I would have bet the farm was never going to happen. We own books that we would not have otherwise bought. While I don't go much past that she spends money on all kinds of other Game of Thrones related junk. That all started because through word of mouth I heard that the show was good and downloaded a few episodes.