‘Game Of Thrones’ Viewership Down From Final Season Debut, Up From Season 8
On the cusp of the battle of all battles on Game Of Thrones, Easter Sunday’s “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” second episode of the final season of the HBO blockbuster had a lot of drinking, a lot of talk about death and some mixed messages viewershipwise.
Coming off the sky high Dragon flying numbers of the long anticipated April 14 debut, the just over 1 hour long April 21 episode snared 10.3 million viewers on HBO proper. While down about 12.5% in terms of those watching on linear TV from last week’s “Winterfell,” the fifth to last episode of GoT ever is actually the fourth most watched episode of the series ever.
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Now, that’s doesn’t include the digital viewership off HBOGo and HBO Now.
elling of how people actually watch the small screen in 2019, that additional data pushed the Season 8 opener to 17.4 million, the largest viewership GoT has ever had. Throwing the online platforms into the equation and the the total viewership for “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” bops up to 15.9 million. Taking the holiday weekend into account and the fact that the April 21 data only includes two airings of GoT compared to last week’s three airings due to length, “A Knight” dipped 8.2% from “Winterfell.”
As it is right now, on linear TV, the Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Lena Headey and Peter Dinklage led Thrones is up 10.6% from the second episode of the last season. That “Stormborn” episode of Season 7 aired on July 23, 2017 – which was not a holiday weekend like this Sunday.
Despite the premium cabler’s ongoing carriage battle with Dish, which is has HBO dark, GoT was still the biggest thing on the small screen on Sunday.
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