This story about a U.K. court ordering Popcorn Time blocked has been knocking around in my brain for a couple of days now. When stuff knocks around in my head for days, chances are it will end up in written form, right here. So here we go.

It is not an absurd ruling, although I certainly take issue with the claim that, as the MPAA alleged, Popcorn Time “has no legitimate purpose and it only serves to infringe copyright.” There are plenty of places to find legal torrents. I know most people are using Popcorn Time for piracy though, because they ask me if it is illegal, since it “seems a lot like Netflix.”

It is definitely illegal to use Popcorn Time or any other software to download, disseminate, view or otherwise consume any movie, song or other media for which you would otherwise have to pay money.

This is the insightful bit of the article, though:

For media companies, stamping out Popcorn Time has been a virtually impossible task. The free, open-source apps, originally created by an anonymous group of developers in Argentina, are now hosted on multiple sites and allegedly have several hundred volunteer programmers working on various iterations, including mobile versions of the apps.

Here is an interactive version of the graph displayed above, showing worldwide search volume from the preceding twelve months:

//www.google.com/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&q=netflix,+HBO,+Popcorn+Time&date=today+12-m&cmpt=q&tz&tz&content=1&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=5&w=700&h=400

Netflix is doing just fine, for now. But HBO, excepting a bump in mid-April coinciding with the increased promotion of their new HBO Now service, is losing ground to Popcorn Time in worldwide search.

Here is the same type of search volume comparison, but this time zoomed in to the preceding 90 days and including only HBO and Popcorn Time:

//www.google.com/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&q=HBO,+Popcorn+Time&date=today+3-m&cmpt=q&tz&tz&content=1&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=5&w=700&h=400

HBO does not have as wide a lead as Netflix, but the time to react to stiff competition is not after that compeitition has matched or overtaken you. For Netflix and HBO, that time is right now. Netflix has massive infrastructure and an increasingly impressive library of original productions. And HBO has NBO Now, uh, now, which unbundles the premium channel from cable subscriptions. These are both good reactions to the rise of competitors, legitimate and otherwise. But those strategies are not enough.

The takeaway? Popcorn Time has become similar to Anonymous or, albeit a more controversial comparison, Al Qaeda. That is, it is not a single organization answering to a traditional leadership hierarchy. It is a splintered collection of rogue outfits, some more law-respecting than others, none “in charge.” It may represent the next step in business strategy companies like Netflix and HBO will need to take to continue their success.

The person or company that comes up with a way to legally and technically monetize torrent consumption of popular media at scale will be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Google.¹

Now, if you will excuse me I am going to go think about how to legally and technically monetize torrent consumption of popular media at scale.

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HBO exec laments piracy of low-quality editions of ‘Game of Thrones’

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The Release Windows Archaism

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.