Lots of people are annoyed that the only legal way to watch Season 4 of Game Of Thrones in Australia this year will be to pay for a Foxtel subscription. Shadow Communications Minister Jason Clare was annoyed too — but unlike the average viewer, he organised a meeting with Foxtel to complain about it.
“I had a conversation with Foxtel about this and I said ‘you guys have got a problem’,” Clare said at the Tech leaders conference in Queensland today. “People like me who love that TV show want to get access to it. If you’re not a Foxtel customer now you don’t want to subscribe just to get that. There’s a lot of people who want to see Game Of Thrones as quick as they can and they won’t pay for a 12-month subscription to Foxtel.”
Was the meeting productive? Not exactly. “In their defence, I think they get that,” Clare said. He suggested that Foxtel’s on-demand platform Presto might prove to be the solution — though the fact that service has already been delayed isn’t promising.
“You’ve got to make it easy to access programs they want to watch,” Claire said. “It’s up to content providers to provide new ways to get access legally to the content that they want to watch. We’ve got to see that approach change.”
Also: Clare owned a Commodore 64 as a kid. Just so you know.