Drip. Drop.
At first it was daredevil, I watched the first episode online and the next thing I knew, practically the whole season was out in just one night. I thought it was quite strange at first but I pegged it down to a marketing strategy, after all who knows what Hollywood is thinking nowadays?
As my previous articles on the paperless forms site have insinuated, I am an avid game of thrones fan; I love the books, I watched all the episodes, and I go out of my way to alienate my friends by being a bit too much of a game of thrones geek. On the 11th of April 2015 I went to bed anticipating the game of thrones season premiere. I had watched the trailer so many times I could recite it in my sleep, seen interviews and behind the scene videos, oh boy was I excited.
Then I woke up to see that the episodes, not one, two, or even three but practically half the season was out… before the premiere time!! Marketing strategy? I think not! Our series have been subjected to a horrible leak. I say horrible because even though it seems awesome that so many episodes have come out at once, I can tell you one thing. It is not as good as you think. Game of thrones only has ten episodes in an entie season. It comes out ususlaly when the rest of the series go on break, so we don’t miss the others that much. In addition to this, I believe that the fun is in the anticipation. Being able to say to your friends for the whole week “Did you watch the last episode of game of thrones?!” that excitement that comes from talking about it, waiting for the next episode with bated breath just absolutely dying to see what the next week would bring us… and now its all just out there, right there and believe it or not, some of the magic has been in fact taken away. The series is awesome and will remain awesome but the experience for season 5 has been damaged.
Asides from the spoilers and the fact that there’s no more anticipation this incident brings up other issues such as the serious topic of online piracy. The episodes have already been downloaded by millions (so good luck avoiding spoilers) and HBO has lost quite a sum of money due to this leak. The hard work and time that the directors put into this has gone to waste. This begs the question, so what are we going to do about this? A similar issue happened with Stephanie Meyer’s book Midnight Sun, which was a sort of prequel to her twilight book series. The book was published illegally online and because of this she never finished it or released it. The fans missed out on what would have been a really lovely book, and not to mention all her hard work gone to waste.
HBO actually made an attempt to reduce piracy this year by making the episodes available at the same time in 170 countries but their hard work now seems for naught. I am concerned with Internet freedom and privacy but asides from issues such as going paperless I also think piracy is something important and should be tackled. What do you think?
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