How many people watched the Game of Thrones finale in the U.S.?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the network rather than the country. A subscription channel reaches a fraction of the households a free-to-air broadcaster does, so even a record-breaking finale on premium cable lands an order of magnitude below a Super Bowl. Tens of millions is right for the biggest thing a subscription network has ever aired.

The platform aggregation is what makes it a record: the figure counts all viewing across the network's channels and streaming apps, which earlier records could not. Series finale audiences from the broadcast era were measured differently and in a market with far fewer options, so cross-era comparisons flatter the modern figure.

The petition detail is the one worth keeping, because it is a genuinely new phenomenon: nearly two million people formally demanding a season be remade. Audience scale used to translate into commentary; at this scale it translates into organised collective action against the work itself, which is something no previous medium produced.