The most popular on-demand TV show in 2018 didn’t air a single new episode.
HBO’s Game of Thrones topped all other TV titles in on-demand streaming, according to data provided by Comcast and reported by USA Today.
Thrones was most recently on the air in August 2017, as it finished its seventh season. The fantasy hit’s eighth-and-final season will premiere in April 2019. So far, HBO has only released one photo from the new episodes and a couple seconds of footage.
“The fact that that show is still ranked No. 1 across the board when it wasn’t even current is pretty incredible,” Comcast Cable executive Brynn Lev told USA Today. “It shows just how large of a following that show has (and) how new people are still discovering it.”
Indeed, ratings for GoT have climbed every season, with season 7 episodes earning around 12 million viewers overnight and up to 30 million viewers when including repeats, DVR and on-demand. The final season will almost certainly shatter all previous records and has a good shot at being the year’s highest-rated drama in the adult demo.
The rest of the Comcast Top 5 most in-demand shows were NBC’s This Is Us, Starz’s Power, Fox’s 9-1-1 and ABC’s The Good Doctor.
The article noted that one other legacy HBO title was also in the Top 20 nationally, despite not airing new episodes in many years — 1999’s The Sopranos.
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