‘House Of The Dragon’ Pulls In 2.6M U.S. Streaming & Linear Households – Deadline

Natch, HBO and HBO Max had a hit on their hands with the premiere of House of the Dragon, which in Samba TV measure U.S. households delivered 2.6 million. That’s the best viewership of any premium cable or streaming premiere year-to-date per Samba.

Note these are the first numbers were seeing for the George R.R. Martin Game of Thrones spinoff and the figures which HBO are releasing later are bound to be higher. How’s that? Because Samba TV only measures 3M Smart TV homes, not mobile. Samba clocked House of the Dragon viewing during its initial six hours, between 9 PM/ET and 3 AM/ET on both traditional linear HBO and HBO Max.

Back in January, HBO said that the Season 2 premiere of Euphoria starring Emmy winner Zendaya pulled in 2.4 million viewers across all its platforms in its Sunday night debut, saying it was the strongest digital premiere performance of any HBO episode on HBO Max since the streaming service’s launch last May.

Note that same-day figure beats the HBO Max weekend coverage of some of the day-and-date theatrical movies during WarnerMedia’s experiment last year, i.e. Wonder Woman 1984 (2.2M in its first weekend), Dune (1.9M), Conjuring 3 (1.6M) and Many Saints of Newark (1M). But note those figures excluded HBO linear as those pics only hit HBO Max.

Samba TV also says that House of the Dragon exceeded initial same-day viewership of Netflix’s tentpole series Stranger Things (1.2 million U.S. household viewers streaming in its first day), more than doubling same day viewership for its season 4 premiere earlier this summer.

Higher income households over-indexed watching episode one of House of the Dragon with the $125K-$150K group over-indexing by the highest margin (+23%) followed by the $200K+ group (+21%). Gen-Z (Adults 20-24) and millennials (Adults 25-34) both over-indexed in viewership by 4% and 1%, respectively.