“Minutes streaming” is an absolutely worthless metric to anyone that isn’t a streaming executive, and it’s not important across a show but across each viewer. It’s not the same as viewers watched, which was helpful to understand the popularity of a show relevant to other shows in the same time slot, because that would determine which shows stayed or were cancelled. “Minites viewed” gives us zero idea if a show is a success, or how well supported it is, because all shows have variable lengths and episode counts, especially in streaming. What’s the value of a billion minutes if 60% of that viewing bailed out after trying the pilot? Why should they count towards a shows success when it releases weekly episodes? What we saw with this specific show was largely viewer counts stay stagnant or even drop week to week (unless it was recovering from a previous heavier down week).

Why are they releasing minutes viewed now instead of total viewer counts? They were making it clear to everyone they started with 10 million live viewers and 29 million total viewers. They ended with less:

> The Game of Thrones prequel ended its first season with 9.3 million viewers across all platforms, down a bit from its early episodes but still the best first-night showing for an HBO season or series finale since GOT’s series ender in May 2019.

The show did well because it’s Game of Thrones. At best it maintained that audience, but it didn’t grow it over the season. House of the Dragon is a good example of both why “minutes viewed” is a poor metric, but it also appears to be a great example of how the weekly episode appointment viewing model doesn’t actually improve total viewership, and without being the one or two shows a year that gets lucky and finds hype for most of them the audience dwindles as the show goes on. With serial TV, you gotta start at the beginning. Episodic shows can grow with new audiences joining each week and not being lost. If you’ve missed the first episode of HotD, there is no point turning on HBO on a Sunday night for the next several months.

I’ll get buried because this sub is HBO’s target audience, but these numbers and this article are worthless, only intended to put “billions viewed” in the headline next to their show to try and get more viewers. We’ve gotta be smarter as a community about what we reward here, especially since every other comment thread is people complaining about the Hollywood media. These are threads that make this sub run that way. We can stop upvoting and submitting this crap, and maybe they’ll go back to real viewership numbers so we know if a show has a chance to not get cancelled. Because that’s what they are really battling: their two biggest and best shows of the last decade, GoT and Westworld, are ending terribly, either rushed or canceled. HBO has a massive trust problem growing. I don’t want to start any new series by them until I see them finish some, same expectation I’m putting on Netflix shows after Santa Clarita Diet and Teenage Bounty Hunters. When you start a serialized show you make a promise to your audience to finish the story. These streamers keep breaking that promise, and their audiences are responding with lower viewership. We gotta stop supporting the current PR driven headlines if y’all want that to change.