Amazon brags that 25 million people watched The Rings of Power premiere

Amazon, like most streamers, generally doesn’t reveal much about how many people are viewing its content. So when they do say something about the numbers, you know they’re happy. And indeed, Amazon sounds like they’re happy with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which they claim was watched by 25 million people in the first 24 hours of release this past Friday.

Of course, there are caveats; we’re not exactly sure what Amazon counts as a “view,” for example, different streaming services using different metrics. But 25 million people is a lot no matter how you slice it. Jeff, sitting in his dark tower contemplating his kingdom, is pleased.

And Jeff needed The Rings of Power to be a hit after spending some $465 million on the first season alone. Basically, if this show was anything less than the biggest show in the history of Prime Video, it would have been considered a failure. So far, so good.

Did The Rings of Power beat House of the Dragon?

Like it or not, The Rings of Power is being compared, loudly and often, to House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series currently dropping new episodes every Sunday. The first episode of that show was also watched by 25 million people, but that was only after a few days had passed, whereas the premiere of The Rings of Power racked up those views in a day.

But then again, Amazon dropped two episodes of The Rings of Power at once while HBO is only giving us one hour of House of the Dragon at a time. When Amazon says “25 million people watched The Rings of Power,” does that mean that 25 million watched both episodes, or are they counting the viewing of both episodes as two views? Until these guys get together and standardize things, comparing ratings between streamers is going to be very tricky. There’s also the fact that Amazon has around 200 million subscribers and HBO Max closer to 70 million.

We do know that the second episode of House of the Dragon was actually watched by more people than tuned in for the first, a rare feat. We’ll see if The Rings of Power can pull that off when a new episode drops this Friday.

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h/t The A.V. Club