In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a better time, over the last few years, to be Nielsen than in the fall of 2022. After a decade of fighting tooth and nail to maintain some fleeting relevance in a world where streaming was rapidly coming into dominance, the ratings company finally had both the tech, and the positioning, to try to answer a question it was uniquely suited to answering, and which millions of people cared about: Who won the big ol’ medieval TV fight, huh? House Of The Dragon or Rings Of Power?
Today (per Variety), Nielsen released another piece of that slowly revealing puzzle, showing off the streaming data for both shows from the week of August 15 to October 10, the last week the company currently has data on. (Oh, you know we love that slow-burn drama in prestige TV country; two more weeks, presumably, until the complete picture becomes clear.) And while the data shows that Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings show tended to win any given week in streaming—keeping in mind that House Of The Dragon was splitting its online viewership with folks actually watching it on HBO—there’s also an interesting trend that develops over several weeks. Namely, that streaming viewership of Rings Of Power fell off pretty strongly after its first two weeks of availability, while viewers for House Of The Dragon tended to go up.
Admittedly, both series only had those individual directions to go in; House Of The Dragon had a slow start on streaming, before picking up momentum as it headed toward its finale. Rings Of Power, meanwhile, had a huge surge with the release of its first two episodes, then a pretty major drop off. Even then, it picked up again as its own end-point got closer; a chart of the comparative performances looks like a trough for Rings, vs. a rising slope for House.
Does that mean the Game Of Thrones spinoff handled its middle chapters better, while Rings got lost among the Harfoots? Did viewers get drawn back in by the Tolkien adaptation’s gestures toward forthcoming plot reveals, luring them back ahead of the finale? Is there a correlation between ratings and how shitty Paddy Considine looks in any given episode of TV? These are the answers only Nielsen can give. Nielsen has all the power, now.
