‘Game of Thrones’ season 6 finale: ‘The Winds of Winter’ streams on HBO NOW without delay

Going into Sunday night’s new episode of “Game of Thrones,” we certainly imagine there being some fears regarding whether or not the HBO NOW service would operate successfully. After all, the streaming service was down last week during “The Battle of the Bastards,” and that was the second time technical difficulties hurt the ability of viewers to check out the show. (This also happened during the premiere.)

Luckily, it turned out that everything was fixed tonight in plenty of time — not only that, but we personally found that the finale “The Winds of Winter” was online a minute or so early, which was great news for everyone out there who really couldn’t wait to see the end of the season. There were no issues on our end, which is great given that issues aside this season, the service has turned out to be a great buy thanks in part to the number of added devices and the backlog of other HBO shows on it.

Ultimately, we imagine that this show is the real testing ground for the network in terms of server load. There are few other shows on the network that will really demonstrate the pure volume that this one will, given that it is one of cable’s most-watched shows, and it has been estimated that in one way or another, more than 20 million people are watching it a week.

After tonight, viewers across any other HBO platform are going to have to wait for a little while in order to see what is next. Season 7 will not premiere presumably until 2017.

You can get some other news when it comes to the “Game of Thrones” finale by heading over to this link. Also, sign up over here to secure some other TV news on all we cover, sent right over to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: HBO.)