On Monday, Game of Thrones finished its fifth series run on Sky Atlantic with an explosive episode. Don’t worry, you won’t find any spoilers on this site (Unlike certain news sites). Anyone who wanted to, could watch it on Sky Atlantic.

Well, up to a point Lord Copper.

If you’re a Virgin Media customer, then you don’t get Sky Atlantic. Sky sees the channel as a point of difference between it’s own platforms and others. So while Sky One and Sky Living are offered to third parties like Virgin Media, Sky Atlantic is held back.

You can, as of Tuesday this week, legally access that entire fifth series of Game of Thrones via platforms like iTunes, Amazon Instant Video or Google Play. But obviously that’ll cost you.

Also this week came the announcement that AMC Networks is launching a UK offering, but that it’ll be exclusively available via BT TV on YouView. AMC in the US has been home of series such as Breaking Bad, and its spin-off Better Call Saul, Mad Men and The Walking Dead.

But who broadcasts those shows in the UK can vary quite a lot. The new Channel 4 Sunday night series, Humans, is an AMC co-production. The Walking Dead, which is the biggest drama in the US, goes out on Fox TV in the UK, with Channel 5 having had second run rights. Mad Men went out on Sky Atlantic having been poached from BBC Two in the UK, and Breaking Bad and its spin-off are on Netflix (although Breaking Bad is also now on free-to-air Spike). Other AMC shows can be found on Amazon too.

What’s interesting about this deal with BT is that they’ll have exclusive access to Fear the Walking Dead – a new spin-off series set in the same world as The Walking Dead. And to watch it, you’ll need new hardware. BT is seemingly trying beef up its non-sport TV portfolio.

Of course AMC now owns a near 50% stake of BBC America, and this means that you’d anticipate some BBC co-productions down the line between the two broadcasters – John Le Carré’s The Night Porter with Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston seems like a good example of this (although I believe this was presented to both parties by a third party who put the package together).

So how this will all fit together with regard to BT-exclusive access to AMC programming in the longer term remains to be seen. However it should be noted that despite the Sky/HBO deal, there are still instances where, say, the BBC does a deal with HBO and Sky is cut-out – The Casual Vacancy being a recent example.

But what this clearly means is that viewers are going to be faced with some hard choices.

At the moment, should I want to watch Game of Thrones, Daredevil and Transparent, I can do one of three things (or a mix of them).

– Subscribe, respectively, to Sky Atlantic (via Sky or Now TV), Netflix and Amazon Prime
– Wait until they become available through DVD/digital
– Pirate them

(I’m not advocating the third, incidentally).

Assuming I’m a Walking Dead fan who also wants to watch the other series, at least until now I could access to the OTT services through an inexpensive one-off purchase of a Google Chromecast, Now TV, Roku or Apple TV box. To see the Walking Dead spin-off, I’m going to need a full-on BT TV subscription and one of their boxes. Or I’ll have to wait until the DVD/digital downloads are made available.

This is where it gets even more complicated.

At the moment, most of these productions are actually owned by third party companies, and they simply licence their output for specific windows to services like Netflix or Amazon. But that has meant that when Netflix launched in France, they had to do so without House of Cards, because it had been licenced to another channel. That’s also why DVDs/downloads are made available of the series in due course – the studio that owns them distributes the DVDs and earns revenues from them – not Netflix. House of Cards tends to be exclusive to Netflix for about six months before the DVD/download option becomes available.

Netflix in future says it wants to own as much of its own programming as possible. In other words, it wants to close off those avenues, or at least have control of them. Holding back programming could make long-term sense in platform building, even if it leaves money on the table in the short term.

In the meantime, I’m not sure that this deal on its own is enough to make a compelling case for anyone to cancel Sky and take up BT TV – as it hasn’t been with their sports rights so far. But I can see some of those AMC catalogue programmes disappearing from Amazon in due course, and I can also imagine that there’ll be a significant amount of piracy surrounding Fear the Walking Dead when fans realise that they need a whole different subscription to watch it legally, unless they’re prepared to wait for the DVDs/downloads.