Pr0 said:
Everyone, right up to the "old men" in the cable industry, know exactly how much the media consumption landscape has changed....its all in how to shift to the new landscape when your investments and legal agreements have you married to the old one.
They don't have to touch any of their old distribution methods to get with the times. Setting up a streaming service via a website is
incredibly simple and takes any college compsci student maybe an afternoon to write code for. The problem isn't their slow progress adopting a new distribution medium in an era where the playing field has changed, it's that they haven't done _anything_ on that front. A non-region-locked website where consumers could pay for a full season up front, get each episode streamed the day (or day after) it airs on cable TV (who has those anymore?), and download links for each episode once the season completes. It's that simple. They don't have to update shit for it, they don't have to violate any old contracts or abandon old infrastructure.
HBO has a literal army of millions of pirates, most of whom are only pirating because there's no other way to get the product in any kind of a sane, timely fashion. 10-month delayed DVD releases, sometimes not even available in your country? A streaming service only available in ONE country? What a joke! Compared to the relative ease of setting up a simple streaming service, the millions of dollars in lost revenue is mindboggling.
This is why the old fogey label is thrown around; they're bafflingly daft to not take advantage of any of the methods that are _commonly used_ today to distribute media. Yes, they have millions/billions of dollars in old contracts and old hardware, but if those are dying out in favor of new tech, you don't stick to them like a captain on a sinking ship. You honor deals you had, try to salvage any of that infrastructure you can, and catch up to an age where paying for shit online isn't a huge mystery. You don't trudge blindly forward insisting your hilariously outdated methods of content distribution still hold water.
In HBO's case, they make some incredibly high quality shows. The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, and now Game of Thrones... their skill is unmatched, really. But they're still stuck in the old world mindset where your cable network is "the only way" to distribute media.
There is no real way to defend them in this situation. They should have much better distribution methods and don't, hurting both HBO (costing them millions of dollars in lost revenue) and their fans (no legitimate way for most of them to watch, forcing them to either miss the show or resort to piracy). They don't have to completely trash their old distribution networks to adopt new ones, but their total lack of progress on that front is why the old men comments get bandied about. The "stuck in the old days" mindset is detrimental, and whether it's actually old men being old men or younger men who are just incompetent, it's not an excuse. They need to get their shit together. It's 2014; consumers shouldn't
have to pirate a show to even be able to see it without waiting 10+ months for an arbitrarily-delayed DVD release, almost a full year of spoilers after the episodes actually aired.
Game of Thrones is such a high quality show, I'd wager the majority of those currently pirating wouldn't balk at coughing up enough money for a season pass to a high quality streaming service. That's really all it would take. A small portion of the pirates do so because of monetary concerns, and those will pretty much always pirate, but the huge chunk that simply love great TV and want to experience it in a remotely timely fashion would definitely be on board with a stream/vod service. All HBO has to do is "get with the times." No amount of old contracts or infrastructure is worth losing custom from millions of potential consumers, especially not when the fix for it is so blisteringly easy.
