So tonight is the Game of Thrones season 6 premiere, at 9p.m. Eastern, and HBO Now is free for the occasion. That’s a huge influx of traffic on what’s already going to be one of the network’s two biggest days of the year (along with the Game of Thrones season finale in June). And HBO Now and HBO Go are great services, but one thing they aren’t is robust. They tend to crash. And if that happens, you’re sort of screwed. You’re just going to have to wait.

Game Of Thrones And HBO Go Now: The Night Is Dark And Full Of Errors

Expect bandwidth problems with HBO Go and HBO Now. First off, nobody knows exactly when the show will pop up on the services. HBO Go, for the last few years, has hosted the show starting around half an hour after it started airing—i.e., midway through the show’s actual runtime. HBO Now supposedly will appear a bit earlier—possibly as soon as 9p.m. Eastern, but don’t assume that.

HBO has rolled out a lot of additional server capacity for HBO Go over the last few years, and it’s worth mentioning that the service is more robust than it used to be. Last year, HBO Go crashed, and HBO Now didn’t…. but HBO Now was brand new. This year, it’s going to get a huge hammering—Game of Thrones is the biggest show in the world, after all. It’s probably going to go down—or at least give us really crappy quality for a little bit.

And if HBO Now goes down, you’re not going to have a ton of options. You can try HBO Go, if you have access—they’re separate services, and use separate servers. Or you can curse yourself and subscribe to HBO proper for next week. Or you can just wait for an hour and you’ll probably be able to stream it with poor quality, or wait two or three hours and stream it at full quality. Up to you.

But honestly, while HBO Now and HBO Go will almost certainly be a little choppy and slow to start, HBO knows the services are going to get hammered. The company is going to be prepared for huge audiences—borrowing servers from other parts of Warner Bros and other things like that. So it’s certainly going to see some slowdown—but, especially since HBO Now is a paid service, you may be able to see the show after all.