That’s what happens when it takes 8 separate subscriptions to keep up with TV
'The Last of Us' Was the Most-Pirated Show of 2023
Submitted 10 months ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://gizmodo.com/most-pirated-tv-shows-2023-last-of-us-mandalorian-loki-1851128743
Comments
axefaire@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 months ago
I went on a smash and grab of all the shows I’d been meaning to watch, but hadn’t been on any of the services I’d subbed to for the last few years.
Turns out they were all HBO shows.
cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world 10 months ago
all HBO shows.
Which isn’t available in the UK so fuck 'em I’ll pirate.
Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] 10 months ago
I need some great stuff to watch, mind mentioning some of your favorite shows? Thanks!
Phegan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Piracy will increase as streaming services get more exclusive and more expensive. Fuck em, we sail the seas again.
meliaesc@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Just re-downloaded plex after a 5 year break after I got the email about prime going up. Back to the seas for me!
Eiernockerl@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I just searched and found my old usenet account again after 7 or so years. Still 1TB of data left! Still amazing content and speeds!
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
We still have a bunch of pirated stuff from years ago, but then we were satisfied with Netflix and didn’t bother using it. Now we’re using it more because stuff we want just isn’t available, and I have several terabytes of space left on it NAS. All I need now is to get less lazy and start filling up again.
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
… How would you even measure that?
/edit: ah, popular downloads from one particular torrent provider. Not the wider picture.
Add on pirate streams, usenet, and the other half a billion torrent sites and those numbers muddy a bit…
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 10 months ago
I don’t think it said just 1 specific torrent provider. But even then, as long as it was a decently sized generic torrent provider, what makes you think it would not be representative of the bigger picture?
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
They explicitly state these are Torrent Freaks numbers. Along with:
It should be noted, as Torrent Freak does, these statistics only reflect a portion of any pirated content this year. The stats are specifically for single-episode torrents, rather than season-wide packages, and even more specifically they’re based on data from the torrenting platform BitTorrent. Just as television has grown and evolved across new formats in the last decade or so, so has piracy, with more and more people turning to sites hosting streams of pirated content, rather than “traditionally” pirating content through downloaded, local copies.
These numbers only reflect piracy of one type and among that type only one, very public, provider. That’s quite a limited scope. Lots of pirates don’t like such public services and/or use other protocols/methods of acquiring media.
Personally, I don’t even use Torrents at all anymore, let alone Torrent Freak, yet I pirate hundreds of hours of media every month. I’ve also been hearing far more commonly in the last few years about people using pirate streaming services instead of downloads.
If you want the full picture, you’ve gotta expand your demographics. When you only ask the straight white men, all you get is what straight white men think, instead of the whole community’s opinion.
xor@lemm.ee 10 months ago
law of large numbers: it’s probably fairly representative
cabron_offsets@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah bruh, I can’t be bothered with subscriptions & shit.
RealFknNito@lemmy.world 10 months ago
But it’s this specific show, so I wonder if people were interested enough to check it out but not enough to pay to do so, which would track for TLOU and especially for a video game adaptation.
badbytes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well, not like you can own anything anymore.
theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I don’t get it, the title actually says what the point is… wtf is going on here. Shouldn’t it say “#1 pirated show of 2023 revealed!!!” or “NETFLIX BEATS OUT DISNEY WITH SURPRISE PIRACY RANKING!!”
It’s almost 2024, I didn’t think meaningful titles were allowed anymore.
atocci@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I will give it my clicks, as a reward.
ElBarto@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I’d put money on Australia being the top country to pirate it, no one wants to give Foxtel money to watch a HBO show.
crsu@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I don’t see the draw. Do people like Pedro Pascal because they feel bad for his GoT character? I don’t have anything against him as a person or an actor but he seems like your average TV grade actor. Someone you would have seen ages ago in a show like LOST and forgot about. Good for him but I don’t get why people online act like he’s the best thing to happen to television
wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one 10 months ago
I think they like him cause he is a good actor, and usually people like watching good actors in good shows
Granixo@feddit.cl 10 months ago
I mean he was in GoT.
He’s the antagonist on Wonder Woman 1984.
He’s the protagonist (or at least his face) on the Mandalorian.
He’s co-protagonist in TLoU… and so on.
You might not like his acting, but he’s definitely one of the most recognizable Hollywood actors in the last 5 years.
MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Just to highlight WW84, he was really good in what was otherwise a terrible movie. He also had a killer episode of SNL and was able to save a single sketch on the abomination that was the Bad Bunny hosted SNL episode. He was a delight on the Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
ArtVandelay@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I liked him in Narcos
return2ozma@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There’s also other cast on the show that are all really great actors…
EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website 10 months ago
There’s nothing wrong with his acting, he’s consistently good in things.
wolfshadowheart@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
One of the few actors to actually have differentiation between his characters.
Who he is on The Bubble vs. WW84 vs. TLoU vs. The Mandalorian are all very different, much moreso than many of the “repeat cast” actors.
Chobbes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Arguably their character in The Last of Us and The Mandalorian are relatively similar, at least I thought so, but I have only seen two seasons of The Mandalorian.
KingJalopy@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I’m with you, I’m not a fan of tlou, or him, but he was pretty funny in that nick cage movie, the immense weight of incredible talent it whatever it was called.
Hasuris@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
The most popular show is also the one most pirated…
Amazing stuff
GenXcisguy@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I didn’t pirate the show at first, because I could watch it legit on the streaming service I use. But that service consistently shit the bed each Sunday when the show aired.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
The show was mid. Nothing about it was bad, in fact there were some genuinely quality stand out moments, the Frank and Bill episode was unexpected but really moving, but everything involving the zombies and Joel and Ellie seemed like a retread. Because it was. It was almost a 1:1 retelling of the game with added scenes that IMO felt haphazardly sewn into the main narrative. The game is more engaging and the show felt rushed due to, ironically, being shorter than the average person’s playtime of Part 1.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The best stuff in the show (side from episode 3) was lifted directly from the game. But I don’t really blame the showrunners for that. The game had spectacular dramatic moments, and some things don’t really need to be fixed.
Moments like Ellie and Joel in the truck, Ellie convincing Joel not to leave her with Tommy, and Joel arriving as Ellie saved herself from David were perfect moments, and I respect the showrunners for realizing that.
There was some stuff they changed that I understand, even if I didn’t love it. Giving Henry and Sam more of a backstory made some sense from a working perspective since so much of the bonding with those characters in the game came through gameplay moments and not the cutscenes. It didn’t work great, but I understand why they tried it.
Overall it’s far and away the best adaptation of a game I’ve ever seen.
And episode 3 is an absolute masterpiece. My parents who have always been pretty homophobic were choking up by the end of the episode.
emptybamboo@midwest.social 10 months ago
REALLY tried to like it. Watched the whole thing but then afterwards, I felt like I had watched nothing. The farther away I get from the show, the more I dislike it. All of the acting was great. And when they got away from the video game, the story was wonderful. But I felt like I was watching a video game - which I was in a way. And I felt like it was trying way to hard to be profound. It’s sad because I thought that “Chernobyl” was one of the best things I’ve ever watched on television.
AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It was very average. Nothing much happened, the zombies were 0 threat, Joel was a pussy compared to the game. Ellie was just a potty mouth. The gay episode was great in isolation, but a pointless waste of an hour in the grand scheme as it added 0 to the story.
5 or 6 out of 10.
BigBenis@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s a very plot-driven story with very little deviation from the main mission. I loved the show but I agree that the plot is especially linear (much like a video game) and without the in-between bits where you’d be playing the game in the original story the pacing can feel rushed.
I think the show could have benefited from more time with Joel and Ellie to develop their relationship but I don’t know how they could have done that without bloating the story with filler that wasn’t original to the game, which would not have gone over well.
Emerald@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think I may have actually pirated this one at some point. Never intended to watch it, just a grab and seed sort of deal
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 10 months ago
Because Now TV is a piece of shit.
smolyeet@lemmy.world 10 months ago
it’s a quantity/quality problem. you really need to need to rely on word of mouth because there’s just so much to sort through and a lot of it is bad or could have been better. Sure , you get your hits like squid games that it’s hard to not know about it , but something like Severance on Apple TV + , I probably wouldn’t have watched it on my own despite having the service.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Yup, I haven’t watched a TV series in ages other than those “gameshows” like “Is it Cake” or whatever, and we’re mostly there to guess who’ll win.
My kids watch lots of shows, but I would honestly be fine cancelling my subscriptions and just playing video games if it wasn’t for them.
yamanii@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Didn’t watch it since I already hate Joel’s guts from the game, but I can’t wait for part 2 so we can have all that discourse all over again after the golf episode.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 10 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Torrent Freak’s annual look at piracy in 2023 saw the top 10 shows once again dominated by familiar faces from the world of streaming sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero material.
It’s a running trend for the last few years since the age of Game of Thrones’ climax—which dominated torrent sites for pretty much the entirety of its run, a legacy continued now by House of the Dragon, which took the crown in 2022—gave way to pirated streaming content.
It should be noted, as Torrent Freak does, these statistics only reflect a portion of any pirated content this year.
But even with that in mind, it’s not surprising that for the most part the biggest shows in demand are the ones that require premiums to access across multiple streaming platforms—even The Last of Us fits this, as both a hybrid show broadcast on premium cable and simulcast on (HBO) Max.
As the streaming age continues to descend into a portfolio of walled gardens, rather than its initial promise of offering access to content from a variety of studios in a singular place, it remains unsurprising that people will see piracy as an alternative to paying for another subscription-based service on top of what they already do to try out a show.
It’s not like the streamer didn’t have any big shows this year, either—it’s more likely that a lot more people have a Netflix subscription than they do an Apple TV+ or Disney+ subscription… and given the general trend across many streaming platforms this year has been increasing prices on cut or stagnated content, and, well, can you blame people for not wanting to buy in on top of what they already have?
The original article contains 485 words, the summary contains 281 words. Saved 42%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Muffi@programming.dev 10 months ago
Before they changed to HBO max, it was the only streaming service worth paying for. Once they started removing their own god damn shows, it was back to the bay.
Critical_Insight@feddit.uk 10 months ago
It’s one of the few shows that peaked my interest as I love zombies and post apocalyptic worlds but I only got thru like 4 or 5 episodes until I stopped watching as it was utter garbage as are most things that’s on TV nowdays. That’s why I don’t feel like paying for it either. I don’t seem to be in the target audience for most things.
gregorum@lemm.ee 10 months ago
You’re welcome
pope@c0tt0n.world 10 months ago
@return2ozma @technology Hated that showreturn2ozma@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I was expecting more zombies but I actually did really like the show.
pope@c0tt0n.world 10 months ago
@return2ozma The hype killed it for mecashews_best_nut@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I would have expected a man with a rainbow heart to have enjoyed the rampant homosexuality. 🌈
White_Flight@lemmy.world 10 months ago
and it sucked
ChanchoManco@lemm.ee 10 months ago
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I didn’t even understand how to watch it in Germany (eventually figured it out, but the high seas were easier to sail).
I did buy the UHD Blu-ray set of this season though, because I enjoyed it quite a bit.
DJDarren@thelemmy.club 10 months ago
Speaking as a Brit, the only way to get TLoU was to subscribe to Sky TV, which (as far as I’m aware) requires a 12 month contract. Fuck that, quite frankly.
So I took to the high seas because I could.
Jackthelad@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There’s also Now TV, or NOW as it’s called…err… now.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Amazon Prime is now charging to get rid of ads
Squizzy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Is that worldwide? I just assumed it was US only
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
… How would you even measure that?
LufyCZ@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Monitoring torrents, especially public ones, is quite easy.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
While the Brits commonly use fortnights and “next Tuesdays” the conversion to months isn’t too complicated if you’re used to it
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Now tv didn’t require a contract like that, in fact we just used a trial which they’re very generous on giving out to people multiple times. So when a site like that comes out we use a trial if there’s one available and then depending on the runtime we might only have to pay a month and it’s pretty cheap if you just get TV shows and not movies.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 months ago
Now TV is fucking awful though. They still think 1080p and surround sound are luxury optional extras.
It’s basically just cybersquatting on shows so nobody else can have them, and remind you that you could watch them in decent quality if only you weren’t such a cheapskate and would subscribe to full Sky.