I could be mistaken on this, but wasn't this basically the sales pitch for Spotify? Basically saying "you'll never get rid of piracy, but you can compete with it".

This was the sales pitch for iTunes and the iTunes store:

"We approached it as 'Hey, we all love music.' Talk to the senior guys in the record companies and they all love music, too. … We love music, and there's a problem. And it's not just their problem. Stealing things is everybody's problem. We own a lot of intellectual property, and we don't like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we're optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be; there’s just no legal alternative. So we said, Let's create a legal alternative to this. Everybody wins. Music companies win. The artists win. Apple wins. And the user wins because he gets a better service and doesn't have to be a thief."

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a11177/steve-jobs-esqu...

Another point of reference: because they had no legal ground to stand on, HBO targeted Canadian torrenters of Game of Thrones with an e-mail saying, among other things, "It's never been easier to [watch Game of Thrones legally]!"

This was true, it had never been easier. It had also never been harder. For the entire time that Game of Thrones was being aired, the only legal way for Canadians to watch it was to pay about a hundred dollars per month for cable and the cable packages that would give them HBO. You could buy it on iTunes, but only as a season, after the season was over.

So yeah, I kept torrenting it, everyone I know kept torrenting it, and everyone hated (or laughed at, or both) HBO the whole time.

Interesting that it depends so much on region.

Here in the UK, Sky offer a cheap 'over-the-top' streaming alternative to their satellite offerings, [0] so you could watch Game of Thrones for £8/month, provided you didn't mind the inferior video quality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_TV_(Sky)

They have a "topup" now which allows you to get real, full-fat 1080p.

Woohoo!

I did actually add that to my subscription, and during lockdown have used it to re-watch Game of Thrones :)

I gave that a go but wasn't impressed by the 1080P quality. I suspect they're using a low bitrate.

Most likely. You can get the bitrate to display (when the video controls are up maybe?) if you wanted to take a look.

Between that and whatever magic my OLED tv was doing, it looked pretty good to me.

Just a shame they haven't released it all in 4K/UHD yet...

I doubt they'll offer 4K. They want to push people toward their expensive satellite packages for that.

I meant HBO! I think GoT season 1 is the only season that's had a release at that res so far.

I was really hoping to get an HDR version of the "The long night", to address some of the banding and other visibility problems present in the episode, and maybe see a bit more of what went on. But there isn't one yet. So I watched it with the lights out so that my eyes adjusted :)

But yeah, you're probably right, NowTv has massive potential to undercut their main offering.

This was also a sales pitch for Steam – especially in developing countries where the whole concept of paying for non-physical things was a hard sell.

(Though in this case it wasn't just competition – access to official servers in online games was something that was often not pirateable.)

Not sure about Spotify, but I know gabe newell had famously made basically this argument, in regards to steam's success