A lot of companies have made fortunes by giving "unreasonable" customers what they want quickly and at an affordable price. Their slow, overpriced competitors...not so much.
Along a very similar vein, in an interview with Forbes, HBO basically expressed the view that watching things on the internet is a temporary phenomenon. It shows how out of touch a lot of these people are. Wanting content fast is "unreasonable"?<p>Pretty strange.
> Piracy will continue, he said, no matter what providers do.<p>Of course it will. But this is like arguing that crime will never hit 0%, so why bother trying?
Remember when we had to wait almost a year for a film to be available on VHS? For some strange reason, I clearly remember the first time I was wowed at how fast a movie made it to dvd. It was some movie with Lucy Lue that came out in like October and was on dvd by December.<p>Found it
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308208/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308208/</a>
"Aussies have to wait an additional week to view episodes of the show. Little surprise then that they turned to BitTorrent in droves..."<p>I think this says a lot about how the internet has changed society. Waiting one week is not a big deal. There used to big release gaps between countries when movies were released in the cinema. Sure it sucked but life went on. I know that many people don't think piracy constitutes theft (although it sounds like these people would have paid, so it is a lost sale), but having to wait one week should not be justification for pirating content.<p>A lot of money is put into making a show like Game Of Thrones. The £1.89 iTunes charges per episode would not be enough to cover the budget and I believe that's why this staggered roll out happens (deals with TV companies are more lucrative). If the episodes were priced higher (say £4.99) but released immediately I don't think very many people would pay.<p>The internet seems to be fostering an attitude of "We want it now, and we want it free or very cheap".<p>I think it's going to be very hard to ever find that sweet spot where people are happy with what the content company can viably offer, and they won't pirate.<p>Edit: I think this article explains my first point well. <a href="http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that-torrents-the-crown/" rel="nofollow">http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that...</a>