New Nielsen data indicates that House of the Dragon got off to a scorching start on HBO Max, even though it didn’t have enough fire to burn down the rest of the streaming competition in its early hours.
After its August 21 launch, Dragon didn’t appear in the top 10 of Nielsen’s weekly rankings for streaming movies, although this was just a result of time.
Because Nielsen only counts streaming from Monday through Sunday, just a very small portion of the show’s premiere was included in the weekly figures. Because of this technique, the chart for the week of August 15 to 21 only included the three hours of streaming that occurred in the Eastern time zone. Nevertheless, in that brief time, 327 million minutes of the Game of Thrones prequel were watched. Nielsen stated that it anticipates the program will “settle in as a regular over the coming weeks” in a release that was published along with the ratings.
With a combined viewership across linear and streaming of slightly under 10 million people, HBO said last month that House of the Dragon was its best-performing original series launch ever. The third-party measurement company’s first look at pure streaming comes in today’s Nielsen slice. The company measures viewing of American titles on six streaming services: HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Prime Video, and Netflix, but only on a TV screen; mobile viewing is not included in this data. After a wait of over a month, the numbers are released.
Day Shift, starring Jamie Foxx, was the most watched movie from August 15 to August 21, with 957 million minutes of viewership. No title exceeded 1 billion minutes of viewing for the first time since April.
While House of the Dragon is likely to have a strong showing for the week of August 22 to 28, it will run into the competition the following week from Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings. Between that fantasy epic and the beginning of NFL Thursday Night Football, the notoriously secretive tech company is experiencing its most high-profile experience with third-party measurement.
