Loyal Game of Thrones viewers were shocked on Sunday when Brooklyn bar, Videology, abruptly ended its weekly screening party after two years. The reason? The small neighborhood stronghold was served a cease-and-desist by HBO.
To celebrate the premiere of the program Videology threw a party and charged a cover, to pay for food and drink says co-owner Wendy Chamberlain. HBO saw this as profiting off of the show. “As a pay subscription service, HBO should not be made available in public establishments,” said HBO in an email statement. “When it does happen, it is of particular concern when there is an attempt to profit off the programming. We have taken such actions for well over a decade.”
“This is lunacy, it is such old-world thinking,” says Yahoo Finance contributor Henry Blodget. “If an agency came up with the idea of having a social strategy, of getting local bars to actually throw parties where people dress up as characters in the show, new networks would be salivating at that.”
“How many sports leagues have moved to shut down local small businesses that have TVs on for football games?” Blodget asks. “The sports leagues which aren’t known as the most forward thinking media entities understand that that’s great for them, all it is is buzz around the game.”
Game of Thrones was the most illegally downloaded television series in 2014 according to the piracy-tracking site TorrentFreak. At the time, HBO programing president told Entertainment Weekly that the title was “a compliment of sorts,” and that it didn’t impact DVD sales. In 2013, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes remarked that the amount of piracy surrounding Game of Thrones was “better than an Emmy.” Now, HBO seems to be changing its tune.
The first four episodes of this season leaked prior to the premiere of the fantasy thriller causing HBO to track the IP addresses of those who downloaded or shared the program. According to a thread on Reddit, one user received a letter from HBO asking him to “immediately take steps to prevent further downloading or uploading of HBO content without authorization.” The unaired episodes were torrented 1.7 million times in less than 24 hours.
The change in heart could be due to the unprecedented production costs of season five, around $6 million per episode. It could also be because HBO is attempting to drive traffic to HBO Now which allows cord cutters to pay for only HBO instead of using someone else's HBO Go password. But ratings are good—the season one premiere of the show drew 8 million viewers, dominating Sunday-night cable programming.
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