Despite being a resounding disappointment to most viewers, the series finale of Game of Thrones was viewed by 2.75 million Canadians across Bell’s Crave “linear, on-demand and streaming platforms.”
To put this number in perspective, roughly seven percent of the entire population of Canada watched the final episode of Game of Thrones through Crave.
Bell says that Game of Thrones’ “record-breaking” final season is the most-watched season in “entertainment specialty and Pay TV history,” with the show pulling in 2.4 million viewers on average. Bell states that this data was sourced from Adobe Analytics.
Back in mid-April, Bell reported that the first episode of Game of Thrones season 8 was viewed by 2.9 million Canadians in total, though this number includes both Crave and HBO subscriptions through traditional cable.
Until season 8, watching Game of Thrones in Canada proved to be difficult, especially for cord cutters. Previously, content airing live on traditional HBO channels, like Game of Thrones, for example, was exclusively available to cable subscribers. Moreover, Bell’s now-defunct TMN Go streaming app could only be used by HBO cable subscribers. Further, neither HBO Go nor HBO Now is officially available in Canada, though it is possible to subscribe to the latter service in Canada with a few extra steps.
With the still somewhat recent relaunch of CraveTV as Crave, Bell added an additional $9.99 CAD per month subscription tier called ‘Crave + Movies + HBO’ for an additional $9.99 on top of the service’s base $9.99 monthly fee. This brings the total cost per month up to $19.98 per month for access to current HBO content.
The final season of Game of Thrones was not without issues, with many Crave subscribers complaining about the platform’s on-demand and live stream quality when watching season 8. While Bell recently increased Crave’s resolution to 1080p across Xbox One, iOS and Android, the platform experienced bitrate-related problems when streaming Game of Thrones season 8.
Subscribers reported the Crave app crashing or dropping the TV show’s stream in the middle of episodes. In a statement to MobileSyrup, Bell said these problems were the result of an “extremely high volume” of viewers.
Bell seemed to have mostly ironed out Crave’s Game of Thrones related issues by the time the series’ finale aired on Sunday, May 26th.
Crave is available on iOS, Android, desktop, the 4th-generation Apple TV and the Xbox One.
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
