It's certainly been an eventful few days for smash-hit TV show Game Of Thrones. On Sunday and just before the premiere of the new season, HBO programming president Michael Lombardo went further than almost anyone expected by admitting that piracy does have an upside. He described massive downloading of the show as "a compliment" and added that it does nothing to damage DVD revenues. A good thing, considering what followed next.

In their own inimitable way, on Monday at least a million file-sharers paid even more compliments to the show by setting a new BitTorrent swarm record. But just when you thought Game Of Thrones news and controversy was coming to an end, another influential industry player has thrown his hat into the ring.

Timo Vuorensola is a Finnish director and actor who recently directed the 2012 Disney movie Iron Sky. Like millions of others, Vuorensola is also a Game Of Thrones fan but he's hugely disappointed with the service being offered by the local arm of HBO.

"Your service sucks. I bought it because I wanted to be able to pay and watch legally some of my favorite TV-series, namely Game Of Thrones," he told the cable and satellite network in an open complaint. "First, the quality you are claiming to be HD is far from HD; yes, resolution matches, but the picture looks rotten and crappy thanks to bad compression rates. The image snaps off and the buffering sucks on HD so badly that it renders the service practically unusable," he continues.

HBO have been accused before of promoting piracy by failing to offer their product in a timely fashion in various countries around the world, but Vuorensola is unhappy with everything - timing, quality and price - all of which are driving people to torrents.

"In Finland we have a saying: 'Pitäkää tunkkinne'. It means: I f.ucking tried to pay for this, but your service only promotes piracy through rather expensive pricing, shitty image quality - and, well, unfortunately also your programs are unnecessarily late," he complains. "[The] latest episode of GOT was already *everywhere* but on HBO Nordic, and I can't see *any* reason you are putting a one-to-two day window to releasing stuff that's going to explode on the Internet the moment it's released," he accurately adds.

And Vuorensola knows his stuff when it comes to the world of files and sharing. In addition to Iron Sky he's also the director of two of the Star Wreck movies, a series of eight films available for free download under a Creative Commons license.

"You think fans are going to sit on their asses and wait obediently for when you finally grant your grace and decide to let the stuff float to the backwater countries like Finland and whatnot. I mean we live in 2013, not in 1993, there's absolutely no motivation for such behavior," he notes.

In what must be the final insult, Vuorensola tells HBO that while he will continue to grace the company with his money, he will shun their delivery service and begin obtaining Game Of Thrones from the most notorious file-sharing site of all. "So, here's what I'm going to do: I will continue paying your monthly fee for the service because I support your taste in content, but the actual content I'm unfortunately forced to grab from Pirate Bay, because your service is atrocious," he concludes.

That's gotta hurt.