In The US, Netflix Checks With Pirates To Decide Which Shows To Buy

In The US, Netflix Checks With Pirates To Decide Which Shows To Buy

The hardest part of beating piracy is finding a way to compete with free. Netflix does it by making things dumb easy, that and purposefully picking up shows that are popular with pirates.

After the recent rollout of Netflix Netherlands, the company’s Vice President of Content Acquisition in Europe, Kelly Merryman sat down for an interview with Tweakers where she said explained the trick: “With the purchase of series, we look at what does well on piracy sites.” Not a bad idea.

In a separate interview, also with Tweakers, Netflix CEO Reed Hasting summed up how piracy helps feed into Netflix pretty aptly:

Certainly there’s some torrenting that goes on, and that’s true around the world, but some of that just creates the demand. …Netflix is so much easier than torrenting. You don’t have to deal with files, you don’t have to download them and move them around. You just click and watch.

Of course the strategy of licensing the most pirated shows doesn’t always work. It’s most useful outside the US, where international rights aren’t always locked down. And sometimes shows just aren’t for sale. You may recall (and should be able to guess) that HBO’s Game of Thrones routinelymaking its own. [TorrentFreak]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.