You've just GoT to watch the premiere!
The main media story for 2019 is that linear TV (except for sports and news) is dying. People want to watch what they want, when they want: who cares about the schedule?
But also in 2019, about 100 million people globally (over 20 million in the US) were slaves to the schedule and watched the Game of Thrones season 8 premiere live. Which is about the same number who watched the final episode of M*A*S*H 36 years ago.
I am NOT asserting that TV hasn't changed in the last four decades. As my friend Tessa pointed out about GoT: "It's in its own category." (And went on to list the ways in which it is different from the traditional broadcast model.)
Nonetheless, that massive audience who wanted to watch a cultural event on TV at the same time as all their friends shows that it is possible, even in 2019. Why? What makes GoT capable of getting us to tune in for that shared experience?
- No ads? (I think this is a big part of it.)
- Cinema-level budgets? (Another big part of it.)
- Genre? (I don't think so. Lots of other fantasy shows have failed to click.)
- R-rated. (Maybe a little - but there are a lot of other sex and violence shows with much smaller audiences.)
- Non-traditional schedule? GoT doesn't air following the regular or predictable season. (I don't think this is helping build the audience. If this had aired a year ago the audience would have been roughly as big.)
- Longer episode length? (I don't think so. Some GoT episodes are 80+ minutes, but the premiere was a pretty standard 54 minutes.)
- It's on pay TV aka subscription only? (One would think that would limit the audience. I suppose it is possible that more people are watching it live out of a sense that only those who can afford HBO can watch it that way, and being able to watch it at time of broadcast is a status symbol?)
- It's cool to watch Game of Thrones, and that overcomes our dislike of the schedule? (Yes, but that's just a tautology...WHY is GoT cool enough to make us all watch at the same time?)
- Although we don't want all of our viewing to follow a broadcast schedule, there is something in us that does like the idea that FOR AT LEAST ONE THING we are part of a phenomenon, all gathered together around a communal fire, listening to someone tell us a saga. GoT happens to (for a variety of reasons, possibly even partly due to luck) have caught lightning in a bottle, and become that ONE THING. (Yeah, that feels like something right there.)
Any other theories?
Chief Advisor IT - Financial Crime Surveillance at National Bank of Canada
5 年10. The Power of good story telling and the fear of it being ruined by spoilers.
I think GoT may be the last must-see tv show. It came to be just before the streaming explosion, two years before House of Cards debuted on Netflix. There was considerably less noise in the market and tuning in live was still the primary viewing behaviour. The death of Ned Stark was the ultimate twist and set up a series in which literally anything could happen. The Red Wedding sealed the deal. Sure lots of shows have cliffhangers but few are so willing to kill off such central characters with so little warning. This intensified the value of watching live before you could be spoiled by your news feed. So I think inertia is the real force behind season 8 premiere numbers. It’s an aberration. I doubt we will see this kind of global live tune in again. Certainly not with any consistency.
PM @ Meta Reality Labs | AR/VR | Smith MMIE | Mechatronics Engineer | Deloitte Alum
5 年Well you could say the TV show WestWorld ticks off the same boxes that you've outlined for GoT, but WestWorld's second season premiere didn't have the viewership that GoT's second season premiere had.? ? My theory as to why GoT has that crazy premiere viewership in this era of technology and content availability is that GoT has one defining trait: there is a lot to spoil and nobody wants to suffer the consequences from not watching live.