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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hilarious that they apparently need to specify "colour" ;).
You can get a discount if you are using either a black and white TV, a TV under a certain screen size or if you are deaf/blind.
1) Premium price, instant gratification. If you're willing to pony up for cable TV + a HBO subscription, you're able to watch Game of Thrones the instant it comes out. Yes, you're paying a lot (~$100) - but - sometimes that's the price you have to pay for a premium service.
2) Pay a reasonable price, get it digitally, but I have to wait. If the $100/month subscription is a problem for you - no problem! You just have to wait. You can legally gain access to Game of Thrones on iTunes or BluRay for ~$40 for the whole season... about 10 months after it finishes airing.
When I hear someone say, "Why can't I just pay HBO directly for access? They're dumb! I'll just pirate it instead." - What they really mean is, "HBO charges too much for my tastes, and I don't want to wait... so I'll just download it." If that's your mentality, fine... but please don't think you're doing it for some higher reasoning. You just want the show now, and you don't want to pay what HBO is selling it. In every other medium (physical goods, food, dinner, cars) - you'd be SOL. But.. just because it's digital, you can copy it for free.
Instead I'd suggest fellow cord cutters just skip Game of Thrones entirely, don't pirate it, don't even watch it. Instead spend your money and leisure time supporting content that's provided online.
When your friends talk about GoT you'll need to have a few canned response-pivots like "is that about orcs? Lawl, hey did you guys see Lilyhammer? It was totally not godawful."
"We pirate Game of Thrones, we use our friend's HBOGO login to watch True Blood…" Yeah I am not associating myself with that. Perhaps something like "We don't currently pay to see your content". Honestly as an Australian I don't see this happening here, the cable here is an effective monopoly and unless they get a cut of the profits they're not going let HBO do this. It might be completely against their business mode…
Could be because it's $3/episode or it's only standard def or it's a week late. My guess is people find it just as easy to torrent it so don't even bother to look at paid options.
So if Australia is being used by HBO as a test market (quite common for US companies in the past), the stats on offering a paid online option in parallel to cable to reduce piracy don't look compelling to me in this case.
"We pirate Game of Thrones, we use our friend's HBOGO login to watch True Blood…" Yeah I am not associating myself with that. Perhaps something like "We don't currently pay to see your content". Honestly as an Australian I don't see this happening here, the cable here is an effective monopoly and unless they get a cut of the profits they're not going let HBO do this. It might be completely against their business mode…
It's an attention grabber, sheesh.
I pay $30/month to watch Starcraft 2 tournaments on GomTV.net. I pay $0/month to watch Game of Thrones, Veep, Girls, and True Blood. I will continue to pay $0 until there is an option that does not involve enriching evil cable executives. Your move, HBO.
As an American I'd rather sign up for "Take My Money BBC."
Would you pay $225 a year? That's how much it costs a Briton. ("The annual cost of a colour TV licence is £145.50")
But keep in mind that content production is a fixed cost, so if you increase the number of subscribers you can lower the cost per subscriber.