‘Game of Thrones’ season 5 now has even loftier expectations due to new ratings

“Game of Thrones” has already been named as the most successful franchise in HBO history based on season 4’s numbers; now, it is time to watch the rich get even richer.

HBO, per Winter Is Coming, just announced in a quarterly earnings report that a whopping 19 million people all opted to check out season 4 per episode earlier this spring. This data is really a compilation of a number of things, including live viewers, streams on the HBO Go app, repeat audiences, and On-Demand viewing. Really, we feel like the audience is easily over 20 million when you remember the sheer number of illegal downloads that happen for this show. However, this is not data that the team can really compile together for obvious reasons.

So can “Game of Thrones” top this somehow for their upcoming fifth season? In theory sure, but this is not going to be an easy hurdle for even them. The fifth season of most shows is when they start to see things start to level off a little. This is when “The Walking Dead” started to hit its ceiling, and when “True Blood” even began its decline. The only shows that really have done something other than this are those like “Sons of Anarchy” and “Breaking Bad,” which really did not have that big of an audience at first but managed to grow it over time as a result of some pretty great campaigning.

We’ll ultimately have to see what happens next … and we’ll be waiting for a while, since the new season will not be kicking off until most likely April 2015.

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Photo: HBO