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Winter has arrived on “Game of Thrones,” and it brought the show’s biggest-ever audience with it



HBO says 10.1 million people tuned into the on-air premiere of the show’s seventh season Sunday night. That’s the most ever for the series, beating the 8.89 million for the Season 6 finale last year by a nearly 14-percent margin.

Replays of the premiere and early returns from streaming put the total audience for “Game of Thrones” Sunday at 16.1 million people, also a single-day record for the series.

The big premiere puts “Game of Thrones” in a good position to continue its remarkable streak of growing its audience every year. Season 6 averaged 7.69 million viewers for initial airings; to beat that this year, the remaining six episodes would need to average only about 7.3 million viewers.

The show historically doesn’t lose much audience episode to episode: Last season, the least-watched installment (episode 6) was only 15.5 percent lower than the premiere. Season 5 was the only one in which any episode prior to the finale fell more than 20 percent from the season premiere’s ratings.