Well the subplot of Game of Thrones episode 3 was not so much who killed the night King as much as it was HBO Go. Okay maybe subplot is a little too strong a word to use there. Probably not even the right one at all, but besides the stories about how angry some people wear that one character killed another versus the one they wanted to finish the job another headline emerged. This one is concerning outages on HBO GO during the broadcast of Game of Thrones.
Apparently some users were unable to access the show via HBO’s TV everywhere app. What you should pay attention to hear is TV everywhere app. The reason I’m making this point is HBO Go is meant for cable subscribers to be able to access the programming that they paid for Via their cable subscriptions. HBO GO is not HBO Now. HBO Now is a monthly subscription service that costs $15 a month to give users access to everything somebody can access on HBO Go without a cable subscription.
This has been left out of the coverage concerning HBO Go and problems during Game of Thrones, which is not a new phenomenon by the way. Have you put it together yet? One of the reasons HBO Go might have struggled during the broadcast of Game of Thrones could very well be people who do not pay for cable using HBO Go to access the show by borrowing password. People certainly aren’t going to go online and say this but if some of the users were being honest in their angry tweets they would say “hey my mom pays good money for this and I want to be able to access it”.
Anybody who’s really trying to access HBO GO should be able to access it through their cable box shouldn’t they? Not to say that some of us aren’t forced to sneak off to a quiet place with an iPad because the wife for the husband really doesn’t want to watch the show we want to watch. This is really just a guess not an accusation. But I did notice that HBO Now didn’t have outages. I also noticed that HBO in general didn’t crash. So on nothing more than an educated guess I’m going to say this. As long as password sharing is a thing so will occasional crashes be the case. If it turns out I’m dead wrong then I’ll be glad to admit it. Add HBO kind of does this for a living and has served for a very long time.
