Game of Thrones Season 6 is the most watched year yet

There’s still one episode to go in Game of Thrones Season 6, but HBO is calling it now: this has been the most-watched year of the show to date.

This isn’t a huge surprise, since same-day ratings have been consistently excellent throughout the year, but now HBO has released more detailed data about how viewers across all platforms (same-day, repeats, DVR, and streaming) have been watching the show to USA Today. Here are some highlights:

• The show has averaged 23.3 million viewers per episode, which is up 15% from Season 5.
• The first-run episodes on Sunday have nabbed an average of 7.3 million viewers, up by 6% from last year.
• Overall TV and on-demand viewership is up 4%.

Here’s the big one: since last year, Game of Thrones viewing on HBO Now and HBO Go has shot up by 70%, to 2.5 million streams per episode. It appears that HBO Now subscriptions have gone up considerably since the service launched in April of 2015, when it was only available on Apple TV. HBO claimed that the service had 800,000 subscribers as of January 1 of this year, and that number very likely increased as Game of Thrones Season 6 grew nearer. By the time “Battle of the Bastards” rolled around, the numbers were high enough to crash the service! An inauspicious milestone!

“Mother’s Mercy,” the Season 5 finale, broke viewership records when it aired last year. Will the Season 6 finale, “The Winds of Winter,” follow suit? We’ll find out soon enough.