HBO Issues Takedown Notices to Periscope for Streaming Season 5

Among the multitude of ways to watch Game of Thrones Season 5, there are the legal and the less legal. The legal include cable/FIOS/satellite, paying monthly for HBO, using HBO GO (which basically requires the former), or using HBO Now (which famously doesn’t). Then there are the less legal, like borrowing one’s parent’s/friends/neighbor’s password to log in to HBO GO or streaming/downloading pirated copies from websites. And then there’s the more newfangled, obscure ways, like Periscope.

Periscope is a relatively new app (about a year old) which allows people to stream video over Twitter. Much like YouTube when it first debuted, the idea is that people make their own videos and content, a new way to get their vision out there. And much like what happened with YouTube, people have used Periscope to make their own videos…of TV shows as they air, or that they’ve downloaded, such as Game of Thrones. That’s what Australian site mUmbrella reported, although the number of people who watched the show through Periscope–“a few dozen”–is extremely paltry compared to the number of people who watched it by other means, legal or otherwise.

Twitter sprang into action, declaring that they would suspend any account found doing such a dastardly thing. HBO followed up, issuing takedown notices to the Perisocpe site, and demanding that it’s extremely lax regulations of such things be beefed up immediately.

“We are aware of Periscope and have sent takedown notices… In general, we feel developers should have tools which proactively prevent mass copyright infringement from occurring on their apps and not be solely reliant upon notifications.”

Periscope responded that they expect their users to respect intellectual property rights, and…what, isn’t that enough?

This seems like an odd thing for HBO to focus on when a month’s worth of episodes are currently all over the internet for people to download and watch as they please. Not that said pirating has affected HBO’s numbers, as Sunday’s episode was the most watched Game of Thrones episode in the show’s history, with 8 million viewers. The numbers for the demographics for viewers under 50 were higher for the show than for all four network channels combined. (It also gutted the MTV Movie Awards audience in the process.) But perhaps HBO’s inability to do much about the Season 5 leaks is driving it to go after the sorts of pirating/rebroadcasting it can actually bully into preventing, even if the ones it can stop are the ones most people wouldn’t want to watch anyway. After all, Periscope is only viewable in a small window, and most likely to be watched on your phone. With all the money and glorious detail Game of Thrones puts into their episodes, why would anyone wants to squint at a video of a video of it, in a format that low resolution and small?

• Published on 04/15/2015 at 11:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT