Easily one of the show’s most shocking moments – and for “Game of Thrones”, that’s saying something – ending Season 5 with Jon Snow’s presumed demise created an army of the obsessed, looking for clues that he wasn’t really dead.
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Last year, HBO launched their HBO Now standalone streaming option right as ‘Game of Thrones’ premiered its 5th season. The streak dates back all the way to Season 1, which premiered with 2.22 million viewers and bowed with 3.04 million. All told, the Season 6 premiere roped in more than 10.7 million viewers, which is more than 400,000 over the previous record.
HBO estimates that some 20.2 million people see each episode of “Game of Thrones” in the United States, when all the people who watch on a time-delayed basis are added in.
While the numbers are certainly huge, the episode hasn’t been quite as heavily pirated as the first episode of season five was past year.
Game of Thrones has made its highly-anticipated return to television screens as it was reported the first episode of the sixth series was leaked online.
This year’s piracy numbers aren’t anywhere near last year’s numbers, but since fewer than 24 hours have elapsed since the show aired, the numbers are staggering. The Season 5 premiere managed a 4.2, and the finale had a 4.1.
As the season premiere spanned nearly all of the multiple ongoing storylines, it was criticised by some for being a collection of brief vignettes. ABC’s “World News Tonight” was second with 7.7 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 6.7 million viewers. One night earlier, the Beyonce special “Lemonade” averaged 787,000 viewers.
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Those figures are impressive moreso because they don’t include the presumably thousands of viewers that watched the show on catch-up via Foxtel Play or iQ recordings.
