Netflix found themselves in a bit of a situation over the weekend. A hacker who goes by the name of The Dark Overlord got a hold of the popular TV show Orange is the New Black. More specifically, the hacker got a copy of the upcoming Season 5. Which is slated to be released in early June. The hacker was seeking a payout from Netflix in order to keep the leak under wraps. But Netflix decided not to engage in the hacker’s hostage tactics. And can you blame them? The question that I have is whether or not this will hurt Netflix to the degree that the hacker had hoped it would?
The end game for the hacker is financial. Obviously. But will people buy into it? Meaning, will they watch the new season before it’s released? Or will they wait? And if they wait, will be a situation of spoiler alerts all over the internet? Essentially outing anyone who is watching the show? Could someone find themselves in hot water if they watch the leaked version? I have heard of friends, who watched a pirated version of a movie online, only to receive a letter from the company who made the movie. Essentially asking them to pay a small fine, in order to avoid prosecution. Could people find themselves in this situation because of this leak? And if the answer is yes, is it worth it?
What also should be considered is how the information was leaked in the first place? Was it a hack into Netflix themselves, or some company that they do business with? It sounds like the latter. The production company that they were working with found themselves getting hacked. Which also begs the question of how secure your network is? This seems relatively common to me. Common in the fact that these security breaches are happening. And with the number of threats out there, it takes a lot of effort to keep the hackers at bay. Is this merely a by-product of technology?
If I think back to the old days of DVD’s and even VHS tapes, it makes you wonder how things have changed. Back then, it took a lot more work to be able to “copy” a movie to watch. There was always that FBI warning at the beginning of movies that was kind of scary. Or at least it was to 15 year old me. So it just seems that the technology itself has changed and this is the way it is now. Maybe there were just as many people pirating movies at the time as there are now. But the difference is now the person with the original movie is using it as a tool for black mail. Rather than just watching the movie because you couldn’t wait for it to come out.
I’ve gotten off topic a bit here. Hackers are gonna hack. And its up to these companies to decide if they’re going to give in to the demands. In Netflix’s case, they didn’t. But will that even hurt Netflix? Sure, we have been waiting for this release for almost a year now. We are impatient, but is it going to make people search out for those files? Does the average citizen know how to access those files and subsequently be able to watch them? Or are people just too lazy to put in the work? My guess is the latter of these two options. But I will be interested to see if this has an impact on Netflix’s bottom line, or even the number of viewers tuning into OITNB once it is officially released in June.