Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones.

Avoiding spoilers for one day isn't impossible, but what about Game of Thrones fans who don't want to pay for Foxtel but refuse to resort to piracy? They have little alternative if they want to watch week-by-week this season. Thanks to HBO's deal with Foxtel, if you're watching via iTunes or Quickflix this year you can't even watch the first new episode until the middle of June when Foxtel has finished screening all 10 episodes of Season 4.

These online providers aren't keen to hand over exact stats, but Quickflix tells me that the last season of Game of Thrones accounted for 20 percent of its TV pay-per-episode streaming traffic. Meanwhile on the Australian iTunes store the Game of Thrones season pass and individual episodes often sat at the top of the download charts last year. That's a lot of people now looking for their Game of Thrones fix elsewhere. If they want to watch it on DVD or Blu-ray, they'll need to wait until February next year, going by the release schedule for previous seasons.

That's a long time to walk around with your fingers in your ears just in case someone lets slip that your favourite character met with a sticky end. Is there a statute of limitations on spoilers? With the rise of file-sharing, time-shifting and Catch Up TV there's no clear-cut answer, even though 90 percent of television is still watched live in Australia. In the age of time-shifting I think waiting a week is reasonable, but can you still apply that to Game of Thrones when some people have no choice but to wait for months?

So what are the alternatives? Sneaking into Netflix, Hulu or the US iTunes store won't help, because over there Game of Thrones is locked away on HBO. You can't even sign up for the HBO Go streaming service unless you have a home HBO subscription – which makes it hard for Aussies to bluff their way in unless they know someone willing to share their HBO Go login details.