Game of Thrones has reached a new ratings height with its season six premiere, as many fans were hoping and predicting.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the premiere racked up “nearly 8 million viewers during its 9 p.m. premiere telecast on Sunday. But, with two encores and initial streaming data from services HBO Go and HBO Now, the episode grows to a record 10.7 million viewers.”

This total is 400,000 higher than the previous record set by the season five finale, “Mother’s Mercy.” There will be a more comprehensive ratings total eventually with the live-plus-seven day returns.

The Sunday night premiere was also a smash with pirates. Though it doesn’t look like the premiere set any records in that department this time (perhaps HBO’s free weekend helped in that regard?), Torrent Freak reports that more than a million downloads of the episode were recorded in half a day.

Hear Marko Roar adds: TV by the Numbers will soon have some more comprehensive data. The intial airing viewership was practically the same as for last year’s premiere: over 7.99 vs 7.94 million (this latter number will feature in our graphs). One additional airing on the same night last year increased the number to 8.7, this year there were two. We should learn soon how much they contributed to the 10.7 cross-platform overnight total (UPDATE: the answer is the three airings added up to 10 million).

Speaking of totals, our loyal reader Johan summarized the facts:

So with encore and streaming included it grew from 9.8 million last premiere to 10.7 now. Previous high (with encores and streaming) was 10.3 million for the season finale.

For the first time, our favourite, unimportant, yet reliably available metric of initial viewership did not increase from last year’s finale (8.11 million) to next year’s premiere, presumably due to the wider on-demand availability.