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.
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!
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…
It worked fine for me ???
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).
You had one job Foxtel. One job.
So who else ended up watching Ep2 illegally to ensure they got a better service?