The five stages of Foxtel’s Game of Thrones grief
From hopeful denial to full-on Hound-level rage, Twitter was the staging ground for Australia's collective five stages of grief on Monday evening as the country tried (and failed) to watch GoT on Foxtel Now, explains Maurice Riley.
Unless you’ve been living Beyond the Wall, you’ve probably heard about the drama that unfolded on Monday, when season seven of HBO’s acclaimed drama, Game of Thrones, premiered on Foxtel Now.
No, I’m not talking about that cameo; I’m talking about levels of grief and longing comparable to those experienced after Jon Snow’s death, when Foxtel’s shiny new service crashed and left us waiting for the winter that never came.
How did this happen? Foxtel’s systems usually handle around 5,000 processes a day, but on Monday they were hit with 70,000 transactions in just a few hours. Unprecedented, maybe. But unexpected? Not so much. Result: an unintelligible error message reading, “Unknown copy for key (SR101_tile)”. Was that Dothraki?
So when Foxtel’s system crashed around 7pm, we did what any self-respecting, bereavement-driven fans would do – we took to Twitter to publicly act out the five stages of grief and loss.
First there was denial. The Foxtel Now site had 2.3 million page views, with people spending an average of 12 minutes waiting in vain on the failed site.
Foxtel Now engineers trying to fix the outage problem #foxtelnow pic.twitter.com/VUGT0W6d6E
— Jason Allan (@JasAllan) July 17, 2017
This hope soon turned full Hound however, with 21% of posts with anger sentiment calling out Foxtel. But people were even angrier at the prospect of spoilers, with 23% of enraged tweets aimed at those absolute worst types of people who would ruin the journey for those of us still waiting to arrive in King’s Landing.
How Foxtel Now users feel right now pic.twitter.com/vxxDHqA3Za
— C. Robertson (@C_N_Robertson) July 17, 2017
Then came bargaining. “Maybe it’s not them, it’s me and my internet provider choices”, we mused, sending 1500 self-doubting viewers straight to sites like Speedtest.com to verify they did not have slow(er than usual) internet speeds.
Seriously… @Foxtel … winter has been coming for year and still, you couldn’t prepare for this on #foxtelnow … free 1 month of service?
— Peter Gatt (@Algattos) July 17, 2017
Of course, lots of us found reasons to moan like we’d lost an appendage (moment of silence for Theon please), but it wasn’t all down to the crash. In fact, there were twice as many sad sentiment posts about poor old Ed Sheeran’s cameo than about the failed stream.
i hate to be dramatic™ but so far this is the worst season of game of thrones simply because of ed sheeran
— kyle for you Ⓥ (@kyle4prezident) July 19, 2017
Finally, we accepted our fate. If we wanted to watch the premiere that night, we would have to resort to the dark side of the interwebs. But only about 3000 people headed directly for illegal streaming sites after leaving the Foxtel site.
#foxtelnow “And this, young friend, is why we pirate.” pic.twitter.com/drQkL3g5dC
— Mena (@alldaymena) July 17, 2017
It turns out, while most of us bemoaned our grief, we never really embraced a loss. I also angrily posted my frustration, as well as my intention to watch GOT by any means necessary. But in the end, I opened up Netflix, stayed off social media and awoke early the next morning to try again.
If I go to bed now and set my alarm for 5 hours, will the GOT stream be working? @FOXTEL_Help #choices
— Lee-Ann Hawe (@leeannhawe) July 17, 2017
Turns out many others did too. Google searches for Foxtel Now at 6am Tuesday morning were double that of the same time on Monday, and seven times more than the day before that. So it seems, in the end, customers voted with their Tweets, but not their feet. Most of those new Foxtel subscribers will stick around.
As Cersei says in season one: “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” And while Foxtel’s fail certainly inflicted some pain, it looks like it wasn’t a fatal blow.
Maurice Riley is head of media and strategy at DigitasLBi Australia.
Missing a TV show causes “grief”? How shallow do you have to be? Nearly as bad as the video showing self confessed “nerds” uttering about eleventy five “Oh my God’s” after the Jodie Whittaker / Dr Who announcement.
Geez. Get a grip!
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Foxtel’s customer pool falls into two categories:
1. Cable/Satellite – inelastic, much more likely to stick to the service
2. IP(FoxtelNow) – highly elastic, will leave the service when it doesn’t work or the show they paid to watch is no longer playing.
Sadly, for Foxtel – they impacted the most elastic group (IP/FoxtelNow) at the worst time… remember all those people that signed up (the extra growth) just to use the platform to watch GOT… yep – them!
First impressions count. They are remembered.
Foxtel drove massive expectations amongst consumers with their advertising but failed to prepare for ‘winter’. I guess they truly did take a GOT approach by not manning the wall with enough people (capacity).
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Your statement has one critical flaw – you assume people sit at home, had nothing else to do and watch this tv show by themselves and have plenty of time the next day to watch it…
A significant portion of people:
1. Organised to be at home at the exact time and not do other things
2. People organised showing nights and invited friends around
3. People had to re-buy all that food/drink and re-perform all of that effort for people to come over the next day when it worked again.
4. People had to avoid everyone at work who watched it on Foxtel Cable/Satellite as not to ruin it
5. People had to avoid social media, news media for another day as not to avoid spoilers.
I could go on…
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You had one job Foxtel. One job.
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It worked fine for me ???
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So who else ended up watching Ep2 illegally to ensure they got a better service?
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