The results for Nielsen’s streaming chart for this week are out and according to Deadline, Rings of Power got the most streams with 1.2 billion minutes of streaming. This comes as a surprise since HBO’s House of the Dragon was expected to get the most views.
The situation then gets complicated because HBO claims House of the Dragon is averaging 29 million viewers across multiple platforms according to The Hollywood Reporter. Unlike Amazon Prime, HBO has its viewers distributed according to whether they are watching on streaming, on cable TV, or through their international channels. So, counting the number of viewers for House of the Dragon requires taking into account non-streaming services.
Both shows are not only competing against each other but also their predecessors. Even though it is a different situation for both shows, House of the Dragon is expected to get the same or more viewers than Game of Thrones. At the same time, Rings of Power is expected to attract the fans of the Lord of the Rings movies and convince them to watch a Middle-Earth story in a different format than usual.
The two shows are having trouble convincing the fans of their predecessors to watch this new material. In the case of House of the Dragon, the producers fear that the fans might be confused or put off by the significant time jumps and recasting the show has to go through to advance the story. Game of Thrones followed the main characters through their day-to-day life and usually picked up where it had left off at the end of each episode. In Game of Thrones, the audience got to see the characters grow up, while in House of the Dragon the audience gets glimpses into the essential events leading up to the civil war. In an unexpected turn, according to The Hollywood Reporter, House of the Dragon has more viewers than the first six seasons of Game of Thrones.
On the other hand, the producers of Rings of Power fear that the audience doesn’t have the patience to wait week after week for episodes. The TV series is taking its time to set the board and the characters before starting to create conflict and drama. It has taken them multiple episodes to set up the battle between the orcs and the humans from the Southlands, something that would have been much faster if it was a movie instead. And yet, Rings of Power has been seen by 12.6 million viewers. Maybe the fans do have the patience to wait to see the epic battles often depicted in the movies.
Don’t forget to watch the new episode of Rings of Power on Amazon Prime and the new episode of House of the Dragon on HBO Max.