“The Red Woman” live ratings down slightly, same-day ratings set record

The ratings for the Game of Thrones Season 6 premiere, entitled “The Red Woman,” are in. They are, unsurprisingly, stupendous. The show was watched live by 7.94 million people, which is down slightly from the Season 5 premiere (and the Season 5 finale), but better than any other episode in the show’s history.

However, when you factor in streaming data from HBO Go and HBO Now, plus the two times HBO repeated the episode after it first ran, the same-day ratings rise to 10.7 million viewers. That’s a record for the show, so it’s reputation as a ratings juggernaut is undamaged.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that, since this time last year, HBO has driven a significant audience to its over-the-top HBO Now streaming service, so there could be good number of new viewers this year.

No article about ratings for Game of Thrones would be complete with a note about piracy. According to TorrentFreak, over a million people illegally downloaded the premiere episode after it aired, and as of this morning, there were around 200,000 sharing it on BitTorrent.

So Game of Thrones piracy is as high as it ever was, but HBO must be happy that it avoided a massive breach ahead of the premiere episode, as happened before Season 5, when the first four episodes leaked before the season even kicked off. Still images from “The Red Woman” leaked ahead of time, but no one seemed able to find a copy of the episode itself.

h/t Zap2It