Game of Thrones broke ratings records for HBO for the Sunday night bow of season eight and the epic fantasy drama has just done the same in the UK on Sky.

The British pay-TV platform recorded its biggest overnight audience ever for Winterfell; the hour-long episode launched with a total audience of 3.4M viewers. This was split between 2.7M viewers who watched or recorded the first airing, a 2am simulcast with HBO, and 698,000 viewers tuning in to watch at 9PM on Monday night.

Interestingly, 192,000 “superfans” stayed up to watch the show on Sky Atlantic in the middle of the night.

The rest of the audience was made up of people who recorded the 2am simulcast and watched it at some point the following day before the 9PM encore presentation.

These numbers were up 20% on the first episode of season seven, which itself broke records for Sky. The 2017 season recorded an overnight audience of 2.83M, which split between 2.04M viewers watching or taping the 2am simulcast (including 121,000 viewers watching live in the middle of the night) and 788,000 tuning in to the 9PM TX.

A Sky rep told Deadline that this overnight figure for the David Nutter-directed and David Hill-penned “is just a fraction of the total audience who will watch this episode – we anticipate it will increase considerably by over the next two weeks as our customers take advantage of watching the show flexibly on demand, through repeats, Sky Go and through their Sky + recordings, before we get to our final cumulative audience.”