The much-anticipated debut of House of the Dragon suffered a major setback as HBO Max experienced widespread outages and left viewers unable to watch the premiere episode. The new series marks the first return to Westeros since the hugely popular Game of Thrones ended in 2019. It is set 172 years prior to the events of Game of Thrones and focuses on the house Targaryen and the civil war that ripped apart George R. R. Martin's fantasy world.
House of the Dragon, starring the likes of Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, and Emma D'Arcy, is intended as the first series in an expanded Game of Thrones universe. While that show will chronicle the history of the house Targaryen's devastating civil war, HBO is already moving forward with a number of other spinoff series. Although one based on the Long Night, when the White Walkers first plagued Westeros, never made it to pilot, a Jon Snow sequel series with Kit Harrington reprising his role as is already in early development.
House of the Dragon premiered on Sunday night, and the show's debut didn't exactly go without a hitch. Thousands of HBO Max subscribers reported crashes on the streaming service's app and took to Twitter to seek help or to express their displeasure at missing the premiere. But it seems the problem was due to how audiences were accessing the app. In a statement given to Deadline, HBO Max reveals that users accessing the app via Fire TV were the ones experiencing the outages. Read the statement below:
House of the Dragon is being successfully viewed by millions of HBO Max subscribers this evening. We’re aware of a small portion of users attempting to connect via Fire TV devices that are having issues and are in the process of resolving for those impacted users.
Despite the outages, HBO should be encouraged by the news. The network was hoping the spinoff series of one of the most popular television shows ever would carry over much of that audience interest. With the debut episode, "The Heirs of the Dragon," being viewed successfully by millions of subscribers, according to HBO Max, the network will likely not be too concerned about the crashes causing its audience figures to dip too much. This isn't a new experience for HBO, either, as the premieres of the latter series of Game of Thrones were often met with connection difficulties.
While HBO will hope the issue is rectified in time for next week's episode 2, "The Rogue Prince," the connection issues on Fire TV present a greater problem for Amazon. Prime Video is set to debut The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in September, and the series based on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth adventures is set to go head-to-head with House of the Dragon. Both could well be vying for the biggest TV show of 2022, but Amazon will be hoping it doesn't run into similar Fire TV problems during its own premiere event.
Source: Deadline