GAME OF THRONES ratings update

Game of Thrones continues to build slowly in the USA, but its UK performance has become downright unpredictable.

Varys approves of the ratings news, but will not tell the King until it suits his inscrutable purpose.

Last week saw Thrones' UK overnight ratings completely unexpectedly shoot up to 628,000, a 20% increase over the preceding week after a two-week steady drop. Whatever caused that spike clearly wasn't around this week as ratings moved back down to 522,000, comparable to Episode 2 and 3's 531,000 and 506,000. Very curious. In the meantime the 'full week' ratings for Sky Atlantic, taking in online viewings and multiple repeats, continue to trickle in on a two-week delay. After Episode 1's phenomenal 1.852 million, Episode 2 saw a drop to 1.641 million. Episode 3 showed signs of levelling off at 1.584 million. The full ratings for Episode 4 will be interesting to watch, to see if there is a similar spike to the overnights, or if the overnights came at the expense of the repeat viewings and the overall figures remain level.

Overall, Thrones remains the most-watched show on Sky Atlantic. The overnights for its first five episodes are also the five-highest-rated episodes in the channel's history and its performance is strong.

In the USA, Thrones is enjoying a slow and steady build. The overnights for Episodes 1 and 2 were 2.2 million but this has crept up to 2.6 million this week. Consolidated viewings are harder to track, since constant repeats and re-streamings on HBO Go means that the viewing figures for all previously-aired episodes are constantly increasing. However, it appears that total figures for Episode 1 are now exceeding 9 million, whilst Episode 5 this week got up to over 3 million with the same-night repeats. Whilst Thrones isn't setting record books on fire, it's a steady improvement which has made the show the third-most-successful series on HBO's current roster, behind True Blood and Boardwalk Empire. If the steady build continues, HBO will be very happy indeed, though I suspect they'll be a lot happier (and more likely to increase the episode order for Season 2, which a lot of fans and critics are calling for) if there is a sharper increase as we move into the late season period.

THRONES ratings report

Still with Thrones, preliminary ratings information for the third episode reveals that there has been both an unexpected rise in the USA and an unexpected hold in the UK.

"Are you sure we can't record this and watch Game of Thrones instead?"
"No, Mr. President."

In the USA, the third episode delivered 2.4 million for the first showing, up 200,000 on the previous two weeks. Combined with the later repeat, that lifts the episode to 3.1 million, a small but notable improvement over the first two weeks. Given the expectation was that Thrones would start well, drop slightly and then recover, holding its ratings for one week and then a minor rise is unexpectedly good news for HBO. In addition, HBO has added in the free-to-air viewers and additional HBO online figures to bring the ratings for Episode 1 up to 8.7 million. It's possible that later repeats will not add as much to the figure as in previous weeks, since news of Osama Bin Laden's elimination broke just after the first airing of the episode, but we may see increased online viewing from HBO's digital outlets.

In the UK, Thrones was expected to continue dropping and then stabilise somewhere around the mid-100-300,000 mark, the norm for Sky Atlantic shows. Instead, the show delivered 506,000 compared to last week's 530,000, a comparatively minor drop.

Full 'unadjusted' figures for Episodes 2 and 3 in both the UK and USA are not available yet, but the adjusted figures for Episode 1 in the UK have now risen to 1.852 million, which is absolutely massive. The real key will be the figure for Episode 2, which will show how many viewers the show has lost and how many have transferred to watching the show on repeats or online.

GAME OF THRONES maintains ratings performance

If last week's story was about Game of Thrones smashing UK expectations and doing moderately well in the USA, this week was about maintaining that healthy performance and not losing ground.

Gregor Clegane urges viewers to watch his debut episode.

Studying TV ratings is an interesting game, something I first experienced back when anxiously biting nails over whether Babylon 5 was going to be renewed each year and watching Doctor Who's ratings plummet as the BBC did its level best to kill the series with insane scheduling decisions (which they successfully did in 1989). A familiar pattern is to see a new series, especially one as heavily-trailed as Thrones, start off strong, then drop over the next few weeks and then either level out (renewal, but possibly only as a mid-season replacement with fewer episodes), shoot up again (full renewal) or keep dropping (cancellation). However, Thrones doesn't seem to be doing that.

First off, an extra few days' analysis revealed the full, adjusted-for-DVR-and-online figures that Thrones hit for its first episode: 6.8 million watched in the the USA in the first week, compared to 7.1 million for Boardwalk Empire, the most successful premiere in HBO's history. Impressive. Most impressive. Of course, HBO did completely nuke their channels with showings, trailers, more showings and behind-the-scenes videos for the series to the point where an impressive performance was highly probable anyway, but given the lack of a real star name or known behind-the-cameras talent (such as Buscemi and Scorsese), not to mention the perception of fantasy as an off-putting genre, Thrones' first episode performance was impressive.

Similarly, in the UK DVR and Sky Online viewings lifted Thrones' ratings from an already-spectacular 743,000 to a downright phenomenal 1.07 million (or over 10% of potential Sky viewers tuned in, which considering that drama makes up a very low percentage of Sky figures is startling).

For the second episode, HBO kept things ticking over nicely. The overnights for Thrones were 2.2 million, for the first showing alone, exactly the same as for the first episode. The overall figures will likely be down due to the fact that HBO aren't going quite so repeat-happy with the episode this week, but the fact that the show maintained its audience figures on a holiday weekend when the expectation from everyone was that we'd see a notable drop-off remains a solid achievement.

In the UK, Sky Atlantic delivered 531,000 (unadjusted) for the second episode, a significant drop compared to the first. However, the unseasonable weather in the UK (we're currently experiencing the sort of temperatures we normally see in July) and the fact that Bank Holiday Monday was an extra day off for most of the population meant that many more people were out and doing things than a week earlier. Also, the drop-off of 30%, although disappointing, is nowhere near as bad as what Boardwalk Empire experienced (dropping from 400,000 to well below 200,000 by its third episode). It is also possible that, for the reasons mentioned above, many more peopled timeshifted the episode this week than last. That figure will be interesting to see, hopefully later this week or early next. Episode 3's figures will likely be more telling for the show's future success in the UK.

So far, so good. Whilst a second season is in the bag, the ratings performance of the series overall will likely be a factor when HBO comes to decide whether to renew the show or not for a third season in a year's time, so the more success now, the better. But so far things are off to a good start.

Initial GAME OF THRONES ratings info

Due to time constraints and the fact the episode was about to air anyway, I'd decided to hold off on a more in-depth discussion of the first episode of Game of Thrones for a little while. Expect that soon.

Tywin Lannister approves, and will not now unleash some Rains of Castamere on viewers.

In the meantime, ratings information for the show has started to come in. The 'overnights', the first-night ratings, were the first sign of the show's success. Vulture Entertainment reported that it got a 1.6 share which translates at somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million viewers. However, this was for the first showing of the first episode and perhaps the initial repeat. The repeats on the second day were not counted, and nor were time-shifted or DVR or HBO On-Demand viewings. There's also some confusion on whether just HBO subscribers or additional viewers (HBO had a free pass weekend) were counted as well. Combined these should push the ratings comfortably further up, and news on those ratings should come in later today. Some have panicked that the show didn't get the 5 million viewers Boardwalk Empire got on its first viewing, but that was a huge outlier and came off the back of True Blood, HBO's monstrous megahit, which Thrones is now leading into. Compared to a lot of other HBO shows (including True Blood itself, which started with less than 2 million viewers), Thrones has done pretty well.

Even more impressive is its ratings success in the UK. Thrones is airing on Sky Atlantic, a new channel which only launched eleven weeks ago. Furthermore, whilst Sky is in a lot of homes in the UK (just over 10 million, or about a quarter of the total number of households in the country) its television drama ratings have historically been pretty low: Battlestar Galactica typically got 100-200,000 viewers on the far better-known and more-established Sky One and was counted as a success. Also on Sky One, Lost got about 400,000, rising to 600,000 for the finale, and was counted as a big hit for them. Boardwalk Empire got 400,000 when it debuted as Sky Atlantic's flagship show in February (dropping down to 200,000 within two weeks) and was counted as a success.

So all of these factors mean that Game of Thrones getting 743,000 viewers for its first hour has sent Sky representatives into paroxysms of happiness on Twitter. This is a huge and unexpected success. I expect to see a big drop-off for the second week, as that always happens plus it's a holiday weekend, but even so this bodes well for Sky's future coverage and sticking with the programme.

UPDATE
It turns out that the initial figure Vulture reported - which was actually 2.2 million - did not include the Sunday night repeats. With these GoT has been pushed up to 4.2 million, which is excellent news. And that's still not factoring in DVRs, time-shifted viewings, HBO On Demand or the Monday night repeats. So that's smiles all round at HBO HQ then :-)