HBO is making ‘Game of Thrones’ fans watch ice melt for a painfully long time

HBO/Facebook

HBO created an event out of the premiere-date announcement for season seven of “Game of Thrones,” but its major flaws truly tested fan dedication.

On Thursday, HBO used Facebook Live to announce the date. More than 100,000 fans tuned in to watch the event, but it was plagued with stops and starts and apparent melting problems.

In the Facebook Live video, fans were told to type “fire” in order to help melt a block of ice with sudden bursts of fire to reveal the premiere date.

But after about 11 minutes, the video went down. It took nearly 20 minutes longer to bring the video feed back, only for viewers to find the block hadn’t melted much in the meantime. The video went down another time and a new video hasn’t appeared as of this writing.

Fans and critics took the opportunity to make swipes at the marketing failure from HBO, which is normally so precise about how it rolls out “Game of Thrones” materials.

A user on one of the Facebook Live video posts commented, bluntly, “Ya had 400k+ people typing ‘fire’ fast as their fingers and devices and that block is still frozen solid and we’re still in the dark. Y’all might want to resolve that before the fans storm HBO hq like wights and walkers are going to storm the wall.” 

We will be back and ready for more fire soon. #GoTS7

— Game Of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) March 9, 2017

TIL that I’m willing to watch a block of ice melt over the date of a TV show I care little about in order to get out of doing work.

— Scott Tobias (@scott_tobias) March 9, 2017

Wow. The #GOTs7 ice block says “La La Land”

— Matt Miller (@Official_MattM) March 9, 2017

Someone off-camera just sighed deeply. #GameofThroneIceWatch http://pic.twitter.com/hp4v5KaL1w

— Kim Renfro (@kimrrenfro) March 9, 2017

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