Season 5 Premiere in San Francisco Was An Apple Centric Decision

I wasn’t the only one who noticed that the US premiere red carpet live stream was full of “superfans” who looked like they stepped out from behind the Apple Genius Bar, but at the time I chalked it up to holding the event in San Francisco. After all, these are the people who invented the Apple Genius bar concept to begin with, so it only makes sense that they’d dress like that. And with the Live Stream being held at 6pm PST, it also stood to reason that most of these “A-Lister fans” who spent the extra money to get up close and on camera were probably middling to high-level tech employees who came straight from work.

But it turns out that the “Genius Bar” look was, in fact, probably intentional, as was the entire choice to hold the US premiere in San Francisco, instead of an entertainment capital like New York or LA. It was all part and parcel with HBO’s choice to do the exclusive (well, mostly exclusive) HBO Now deal with Apple.

For more, including a causal mention of the exact roll out date for HBO Now, check out below.

Apparently HBO made sure that reporters would make the connection:

At the premiere, HBO executives noted that holding the event in San Francisco was a natural extension of the channel’s new tech-friendly strategy.

“Look at who’s here,” said one high-ranking official, gesturing to the crowd of top tech executives. Representing companies like Craigslist, YouTube, Yahoo and, of course, Apple, the bigwigs mingled with the stars of the show. On hand were Peter Dinklage, Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington.

“It’s a huge geek show,” noted the exec. “And this is a huge geek town.”

Also, according to this article, the HBO Now roll out is going to be cutting it very, very close to the Game of Thrones Season 5 premiere. Same day, in fact.

The new service, which will offer HBO shows on demand for a mere $15 a month, launches on April 12 — the same day that “GoT” premieres.

I’ll admit, that factoid–if it’s true–makes me a little nervous for HBO. That doesn’t give techs much time to trouble shoot if something goes wrong, or people signing up flood the system and it crashes. Even the WWE, who were the first to roll out a stand alone streaming channel last year, debuted their network a month before their marquee event, in order to iron out the kinks ahead of time. HBO’s stand alone service is built on the same framework as the WWE Network, so maybe they’re hoping that the kinks are already ironed out? Or are they counting on the Apple exclusivity part of the deal to hold back the flood waters of people signing up for the service so that the roll out will go perfectly?

• Published on 03/30/2015 at 11:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT