This time, I wanted to watch Game of Thrones legally – from Germany. The rights are with Sky Online, a 10 bucks a month subscription service. Sounds good in theory. I signed up and then:
- I had to wait 25 minutes for the activation email
- I activated my account, but it wouldn’t let me access my account settings for another 25 minutes
- then I had to install Silverlight (I’m on OS X)
- then I tried to start the stream, which resulted in an OS freeze and something like the OS X blue screen, which I have never seen ever before
- then I rebooted and tried again, which failed with the *authentication* step
- the web inspector showed a bunch of JS and/or Silverlight errors
- I gave up and installed Silverlight on my wife’s Win 10 machine
- the stream would load, but it has hard-coded German subtitles for signs and Dothraki scenes, which is annoying.
- it has no optional English subtitles
- it is only HD, not Full HD
- stream was kind of laggy
So, now compare this to the pirated process:
- downloads very fast
- usually there are subtitles
- superb quality
- I can watch whenever I want with the player I want
- no browser plugins, no errors, no nothing.
- it just works
