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Steganography (which may or may not have been used) wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the number of downloads
I don't see anyone anywhere claim that it would. It would only aid in tracing the source of the leak.
Anyway, the horses have bolted and the damage is done.
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Unsure how the credits work for Game of Thrones, but if it's like most shows where it's just the rolling black screen at the end of the show then most torrents cut that part off entirely by default.
Still waiting for some clever chap to cut the opening out as well. The dream would be to have one version of the opening and a mencoder script to put the pieces back together. It would shave a few dozens megabytes on each file off.
Anyone else here think HBO's missing out on a business opportunity? I wonder why they don't charge rabid fans (a _lot_) extra for early access to episodes. There appears to be a lot of demand for this.
Those episodes would immediately be leaked to everyone after becoming available and HBO would lose a ton of viewership on its own platform.
Can someone help me understand the negative impact of this leak? From what I can tell, the leak only benefits HBO. Viewership numbers in the age of time-shifting are worthless. Moreover, viewers now cost HBO money, in terms of server load during the peak viewership time. If even a small number of people avoided the broadcast during the premiere, HBO actually wins - and there's no telling how many people decided to su…
The best way to deal with piracy is by offering a better experience to customers than to pirates. Here, that would be HD + not having to look for a torrent server that isn't currently blocked in your country. Just as people rarely try to evade paying their train/tube tickets unless they're broke: their time and convenience isn't worth that sort of hassle.
Had it been a leak of one episode hours before it aired, it wouldn't have been detrimental to HBO. But 4 episodes at once mean pirates can get one month worth of binge watching, which is _the_ thing people want and TV channels can't offer. That means many paying HBO customers will watch the pirated version and ask themselves why they keep paying their subscription. Even those who choose not to watch the leaked versions, will no doubt experience some amount of frustration due to having to make that choice. And their are other minor inconveniences, such as having to avoid spoilers on forums.
Your point would have been completely valid, had GoT been produced by a binge-friendly media such as Netflix, though.
Or there's another reason not to use a better tracking system: HBO is ok with leaks. The more the show gets leaked, the larger the audience. Some portion of that audience will pay for HBO, and hopefully stick around for the other HBO shows. HBO has been remarkably progressive on the piracy front. It's also only the first four episodes: enough to get you hooked enough to want to see the end. Of course, torrents are al…
This seems like the most likely scenario. After all, how do the leaks negatively affect HBO? Anyone who was going to pay for HBO to watch the first four episodes had almost certainly already paid HBO by the day of the first episodes' airing. Only four episodes leaked, so no one is going to cancel HBO because they already received their Game of Thrones fix. HBO has no advertising, so the actual ratings for their shows…
> Apart from that I think that binge-watching the first > 4 episodes is a stupid idea that will make you ache > for a month waiting for the 5th episode ☺. For me, I find more enjoyment in binging shows than being drip-fed, I watched all 4 in a row and don't regret not waiting (besides I've waited 12 months I can wait a few more weeks for more.) But more importantly, my online activity means I'll probably be spoiled b…
I honestly think that there needs to be a compromise between the weekly releases common in TV and the season dumps common by streaming services like Netflix. Dumping the whole season at once doesn't allow any communal discussion or suspense, dragging it out over 2 months is meant more to drive revenue for the distributors than the enjoyment of the viewing public. I think releasing 3 episodes a week is probably the op…
1) use stenography or some other subtle process to watermark content
2) put a big obvious decoy watermark in the corner
Leaker chuckles to themselves thinking what a dumb publisher this is, masks out #2 and releases it. Publisher immediately identifies them by #1.
Does all the math littering this post add anything? "Add a few ms variation to each each scene" seems extremely self-explanatory, and so does the concept that only a few bits per scene are needed to produce a meaningful number of variations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see anyone anywhere claim that it would. It would only aid in tracing the source of the leak.
True - and then what? The leaked episodes may have been stolen or can be claimed to have been stolen. Anyway, the horses have bolted and the damage is done.
For at least the last 20 years, there are steganographic watermark systems in which inocuous parts of the images are used to hide coded data that stands up to even most lossy recompression. Either HBO is using these and nobody knows yet; or they had an internal leak prior to their application; or they leaked it themselves. Under no plausible circumstances did they visibly watermark a corner and hope for the best.