WHAT DO PIRATES WATCH?

“You would think that Netflix, HBO, and the like don’t think too highly of video piracy websites,” said Nick Bilton in NYTimes​.com. But it turns out that Netflix uses pirating websites “to determine the genre of new shows viewers might be interested in,” helping it decide what content to create or license. “With the purchase of a series, we look at what does well on piracy sites,” said Kelly Merryman, vice president of content acquisition at Netflix. Time Warner Chairman Jeff Bewkes even said that discovering that the HBO series Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show last year was “better than an Emmy.” The content creators’ laissez-faire stance may just be an admission that cracking down on illegal downloads “is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-a-Mole.”