HBO and the extreme security measures for its series

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Game of Thrones is one of the most pirated and filtered series, so the HBO chain has increased its security year after year

The premiere of the final season of Game of Thrones is just around the corner, and for years HBO has raised its levels of security so that this and other series do not end up filtering on the network before its official release. The ghost of hacking has been presented year after year. This 2019 was not the exception because the network already contains some scripts and fragments of the last chapters of the series. Despite all their efforts, HBO continues to suffer the annoying leaks. It is worth reviewing what your main measures are to protect your productions.

Leer en español: HBO y las extremas medidas de seguridad para sus series

The measures of a titanic production

Game of Thrones and Westworld are arguably the most significant productions that HBO currently has, in addition to preparing a spin-off of the first. La Vanguardia gives as an example the episode The battle of the bastards, where 600 members of the production and 500 extras participated, for the eighth season they have promised a bigger fight. With these data, you can see the magnitude of the production, where each team member, extras, security team, and curious fans are potential dangers for the secret in which it is about maintaining the series.

The members of the production team sign letters of confidentiality to avoid filtering material added to the fact that there are restricted areas in which only such equipment can enter. The extras are carefully selected in the countries where production takes place in Europe, and they also sign confidentiality letters. Until then everything has worked well for HBO, the problem is external: as soon as the fans knew where some part of the series would be filmed, they began to haunt the recording sets trying to take some images, the daily Crónica Global highlights. To combat attempts to interfere in the sets from the air through drones, the production used a "weapon" to shoot them down, as confirmed by Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) at Comic-Con in New York.

You can also read: Everything we know about the new season of Stranger Things

The virtual threats have also been a headache, in 2017 HBO suffered a hack to their servers, where they were stolen episodes, scripts and other essential materials of the chain, for which the hackers asked for money not to filter them. The result: at least four episodes were on the internet long before the world premiere, so the spoilers were unleashed on social networks, which generated discontent among the fans. Now, the measures were reinforced in servers, the actors can no longer have the scripts on paper, only in a digital format that "self-destructs" when they finish recording it.

The HBO measures have been so efficient that other productions, such as Stranger Things, have advised them to implement similar measures for their series. The confidential He highlighted the rapprochement between the producers of Game of Thrones and Stranger Things to share their security measures. With time many of them could become standard for the great series of television or films.

Dubbing

There are two more security filters that HBO has taken care of in detail: the first is the press, which does not send the chapters to make their criticism before the premiere, because according to Xataka in 2017 some of the leaks came from here. The second filter is in the dubbing and subtitling studies to which it asks for strict security measures, from confidentiality letters, secure servers, rooms with access only with fingerprints, among others. With little time in advance, HBO sends chapter by chapter to the dubbing studios in a very low-quality format with watermarks, so far this method has worked for all their series and it seems that they will continue to implement it.

LatinAmerican Post | Luis Ángel Hernández Liborio

Translated from "HBO y las extremas medidas de seguridad para sus series"