What happens when you take the community out of online communities?

With the end of the writer's strike, many TV fans are rejoicing with returning their returning TV series. The show Gossip Girl, which is not fairing so well on television, is having an outstanding season online.

Do to the young audience it's aimed at, these kids mostly follow the show via streaming it off of The CW's website. The Internet community has fully adopted this show as their own. Not to mention the show has an island on Second Life, and the cast members have become the center of gossip themselves on blogs around the internet.
So, as of the return of Gossip Girl to national television last week, President Dawn Ostroff has pulled all legal ways of viewing Gossip Girl for free online according to this article at Wired. However, the show is still available on ITunes. But what will The CW do to make up for the hundreds of thousands of streams they get from the CW website, how is the CW's online community going to react?
This television show is about a blog. The CW is innovating and finding new ways to catch the viewership of the next generation with the streaming video, but now they've turned their back on it. Do you think it will severely affect their online presence by blocking one of the top downloaded television shows on the internet?