Amazon Prime’s new ‘Rings of Power’ series battles it out with HBO’s new TV series ‘House of the Dragon’ for the #1 most streamed TV show.
The big-budget Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power made a big debut on the Nielsen SVOD charts, beating House of the Dragon among streamers. Yet, it wasn’t Amazon Prime Video’s biggest premiere. in relation to the total viewing time. The Rings of Power racked up 1.25 billion minutes of viewership when it premiered on September 1st in the US.
“The Rings of Power” captured 1.25 billion minutes of viewing time following its Sept. 1 premiere in the U.S., the only streaming title to top a billion minutes for the week. Meanwhile, HBO’s “House of the Dragon” drew 781 million weekly minutes on HBO Max. The Rings’s debut is among the best premieres on Prime Video. It is the first series on the platform to take the top spot on the Nielsen list.
With that said, “Reacher” is by far still considered the #1 show of all time on Amazon Prime. “Reacher” had 1.84 billion minutes of viewing time for its opening weekend in early February.
Reacher’s full, eight-episode season debuted at once, giving Prime Video users about six and a half hours’ worth of shows to watch. The Rings of Power premiered with only two episodes, totaling two hours and 12 minutes of running time. That works out to an average of about 9.5 million viewers for the two episodes. That’s more than twice that of Reacher‘s opening frame (4.7 million).
A closer comparison among other Prime Video series is another fantasy show, The Wheel of Time. It premiered with three episodes in November 2021 and amassed 1.16 billion minutes of viewing in its first weekend. Those three episodes had a combined running time of 169 minutes, which equates to an average of about 6.6 million viewers.
As for House of the Dragon, its 781 million minutes — encompassing a week’s worth of viewing for the first two episodes and a few hours for episode three — is up marginally from 74 million the previous week. Parent show Game of Thrones remained high on the acquired series rankings as well, with 792 million minutes.
Nielsen’s “reach” numbers (a measure of people who have watched a given show for at least six minutes) for House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power are quite similar. In streaming viewers alone, The Rings of Power has a head start: 12.6 million people in the US watched the series in the first four days, compared to 10.6 million for House of the Dragon.
But, adding the latter’s viewership figures on HBO’s main cable channel brings the total for House of the Dragon to 14 million. On-demand viewers and viewers on HBO multiplex channels are not counted.