“Game of Thrones” is creating some unexpected winners and losers. The season premiere of the popular series was meant to coincide with the debut of HBO’s new streaming service, HBONow, available on iOS devices as well as Sling TV. Turns out lots of people who don’t have the right devices or HBO still got to see the “Game of Thrones” Season 5 premiere. Several of them also got to see episodes HBO has not even aired yet.
Winners:
1. People whose friends used Twitter’s Periscope to livestream “Game of Thrones” on Sunday night. Followers of these generous viewers got to see the show without signing up for HBONow. So did all the people who happened upon the Periscope videos by chance.
2. Spoilers. Those who can’t wait for the next episode don’t have to. So-called “torrent sites” have pirated copies of the first four episodes of Season 5. These are thought to have come from members of the media to whom the shows were streamed for review.
Losers:
1. Twitter. The social media giant, which recently purchased livestreaming app Periscope, issued a statement saying that Periscope should not be used for piracy, pointing out that the app’s content policy prohibits this. But the burden of trying to monitor and enforce this may fall to Twitter.
2. HBONow. The service got great reviews following the Sunday premiere, but $15/month looks steep when there seem to be so many people willing to share and stream content for free. What’s more, HBO’s older streaming service, HBO Go, also had “Games of Thrones” and it looks like most viewers chose that option if they had it.
3. Apple. Although the percentage of HBONow’s revenue that flows to Apple is a tiny drop in the company’s very big bucket, analysts are paying close attention to Apple’s success in the TV/video area. They’re looking for Apple to disrupt another consumer market the way it has the smartphone space, and HBONow is a key part of Apple’s TV strategy.
Apple, Twitter and HBO are not likely to walk away from this fight; they are more likely to look for solutions that recognize or even leverage the consumer appetite for livestreaming. Mobile broadband is creating chaos in parts of the entertainment industry, and as “Game of Thrones” fans know, “Chaos isn’t a pit – chaos is a ladder.”
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