Pirates of Westeros: the untapped half-billion dollar market for Game of Thrones
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Ernesto at TorrentFreak:
It’s clear that HBO (and others) prefer exclusiveness over piracy, which is a dangerous game. They might make decent money in the long run by selling subscriptions. However, this limited availability also breeds pirates, and one has to wonder how easy it is to convert these people to subscriptions once they have experienced BitTorrent.
TorrentFreak is unabashedly pro-torrent and, some might argue, pro-piracy if necessary. And they don’t exactly divulge great detail on their methodology for determining downloads and viewership. But, let’s assume for the sake of a blog post that their numbers are accurate.
Game of Thrones pulled an estimated 4.2 million legitimate (read: cable-subscribed) viewers per episode and 3.9 million illegal torrent downloads per episode during its second season. You could even, as Gizmodo's Casey Chan did, pull legitimate viewership numbers from Wikipedia and use those alongside TorrentFreak’s download numbers to come ot the conclusion that more people pirated the second season than legally watched it. I don’t think you need to massage the numbers, though:
When legitimate and illegitimate viewership are nearly or actually equal, the market has spoken.
This isn’t about prognostication. There is, at this very moment, an untapped market that rivals the current market, and HBO and other premium television content creators are ignoring it in favor of the legacy model. But maintaining cable deals is a short-term no-brainer for HBO. My own anecodtal market study turns up many torrent-happy people who assure me without blinking that they would pay for HBO every month. I don’t know what the reality would look like, but things are getting interesting.
As you may know, I’m not very good at math, but just for fun:
- 3.8 million illegal downloaders (according to TorrentFreak);
- divided by 2 (assuming only half would ever pay);
- multiplied by $20 (per month);
- multiplied by 12 (months in a year);
- equals $456 million (that’s almost half a billion dollars)
Yes, those numbers are dubious, but the exercise is still indicative that there is something going on here. Does HBO pull more than half a billion dollars from its current cable deals? I don’t know. If so, I suppose an independent subscription model still doesn’t make sense. Erik Kain wrote a good article at Forbes explaining why HBO just doesn’t need this untapped market.
But eventually someone will take this risk, and I wonder why it shouldn’t be HBO, with money to burn and a built-in stable of top-notch content.
#Articles #Game of Thrones #television #tv #cable #HBO #Erik Kain #Forbes #piracy #TorrentFreak #torrents