On Sunday night, Tencent Video, the Chinese live-streaming platform which has exclusive rights to air HBO content in China, announced an hour prior to the scheduled broadcast that Game of Thrones finale would be delayed. Later the finale that was much awaited was cancelled completely.
An official message published on Monday by one of Tencent Video’s official accounts on Weibo, a Chinese social media site, announced that the airing would be postponed.
The notice read, “Dear users, we regret to inform you that the sixth episode of the eighth season of Game of Thrones will not go online at the intended time due to media transfer issues. We will keep you informed of the broadcast time.”
However, HBO dismissed this notice. An HBO representative told The Wall Street Journal that HBO had no problems with streaming it, but the cancellation happened due to ongoing trade war between China and US.
Both the countries have been engaged in a fierce trade war since a year. However, in the past two weeks both countries have imposed heavy tariffs on each other’s products. More than $200 billion Chinese goods sent to the US, and $110 billion of US products are now heavily taxed. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei was also declared a threat to national security and was banned by the Trump administration last week. The ban was revoked later, however the tensions continue to remain between the two nations.
A lot of Game of Thrones’ fans expressed their anger and disappointment about the cancellation and demanded a refund from Tencent Video, while the finale of the show aired everywhere else in the world.
