It’s no secret that when it comes to getting their weekly injection of Game of Thrones, Australians have no qualms with heading to their favourite torrent site to grab HBO’s impeccably-produced fantasy epic. On the other hand, if you were willing to wait a day, you could also buy episodes via iTunes. Sadly, that won’t be the case with season four.
As TV Tonight’s David Know reports, pay TV provider Foxtel has secured exclusive rights to the show in Australia, which means it’ll be noticeably absent from the local iTunes catalogue. Knox talked to Brian Walsh, Foxtel’s director of television, who gave a relatively unsurprising explanation of the deal:
“Series 4 of Game of Thrones will be exclusive to Foxtel. It won’t be available on iTunes … I think having it exclusively in Australia on the Foxtel platform is indicative of the way we’re approaching a lot of our acquired content now. Our absolute desire is to increase our subscriber numbers and exclusively acquiring Game of Thrones is important.”
Whether or not it works in Foxtel’s favour remains to be seen — it might just end up driving more people to the unencumbered freeness of the pirate superhighway.