Is piracy killing Game of Thrones? Not if you ask one if its directors — February 27, 2013

Right now on The Pirate Bay there are thousands of people downloading the first two seasons of Game of Thrones.

To anyone at HBO paying attention, that’s probably a big deal. People pirating Game of Thrones tend not to be people paying to watch Game of Thrones — at least in theory.

But to Game of Thrones director David Petrarca, that kind of piracy doesn’t detract from the success of Games of Thrones. It adds to it.

At the Perth Writers Festival in Perth, Australia last weekend, Petrarca said that the piracy factor for shows like his is negligible because Game of Thrones capitalizes on the amorphous “cultural buzz” that surrounds it. As far as I understand it, this means that any sort of piracy is good as long as it makes the show more culturally popular. This is bigger than just ratings.

And he’s probably right. Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show of 2012, which means that there are a lot of people who’ve seen the show that weren’t willing to pay for an entire cable subscription to do so.

Grabbing more eyeballs, no matter what the context, has significant effects on the overall popularity and cultural pervasiveness of a show. (For example, I’ve never watched a single episode of Game of Thrones, and yet I still snicker when I see a “Winter is coming” meme. You can’t even buy that sort of cultural ubiquity. )

As with most things involving HBO, this conversation is one that unavoidably ties into the dicey subject of a la carte TV pricing, which Cablevision brought back into the news just yesterday.

The conversation is, by this point, pretty well understood: The “have-it-your-way” millennials want television subscriptions on their terms, and the “have-it-our-way” media and cable companies want to keep raking in the cash via existing business models.

No matter how you slice it, there’s clearly a lot of money in figuring out how to bridge the gap between the two parties.

Filed under: Media