With so many streaming services to choose from, the battle for audience attention has never been greater. In the past few months Disney+ has released Star Wars: Andor and Netflix has dropped Season 4 of Stranger Things, but right now two iconic fantasy titles are battling it out for top spot.
In late August and early September, audiences were able to stream the first episodes of Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon, and the next instalment from Middle Earth, Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.
While any comparisons between the two are largely subjective, both shows have received well over 150,000 individual reviews on IMDb in the first weeks after release.
When it comes to the audience’s ratings, House of the Dragon triumphed with an impressive 8.6/10, while The Power of the Rings managed 6.9/10.
These figures are the result of IMDb’s weighted average system which is designed to detect instances of unusual voting activity to ensure the integrity of the rating. The 8.6/10 recorded by House of the Dragon puts it level with a number of iconic shows on IMDb’s Top 250 TV Shows, such as Man Men, Stranger Things, House of Cards and Downton Abbey.
The opening episodes of the long-awaited House of the Dragon were released in late August, while the first two instalments of Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power were available to stream on 1 September.
This also put the two titles in direct competition to be crowned the biggest streaming show, but there was a clear winner in Nielsen’s streaming rankings.
Figures from the week running 29 August to 4 September, The Rings of Power was the most widely-streamed show in the United States with a massive 1.3 billion minutes of viewership racked up in a single week.
