House of the Dragon was HBO’s biggest series premiere with an estimated 9.986 million viewers but if you’re not a HBO or HBO Max subscriber you may feel left out when all of your friends are posting Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock) memes and you have no idea what they’re talking about. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case.

The premiere is now available to watch for free on YouTube, and it includes a warning that it might be inappropriate for some viewers (understandable, given the violence and birth scene). So why would HBO decide to release the premiere for free? Probably to draw in viewers who have yet to watch the series or, given the timing, to compete with the premiere of Prime Video‘s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (The first two episodes of that dropped on September 1.)

The productions for both of these epic fantasy series had massive budgets, and it’s going to take a lot of eyeballs on these series to justify their monumental costs. HOTD is already proving to be a hit with the renewal for Season 2 after the premiere and its second episode raking in 10.2 million viewers domestically. As far as the numbers for Rings of Power, we won’t know those unless Amazon issues a special report. The Neilson Ratings do include Prime Video viewership, but they lag behind by four weeks, meaning we won’t know which epic fantasy is coming out on top for quite a while.

Highlights of the House of the Dragon premiere, which you can now watch for free, include Viserys (Paddy Considine) hosting a tournament to celebrate the birth of his second child (who he is pretty positive will be a boy and one day inherit the Iron Throne) and Rhaenyra welcoming her uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) back to the Red Keep. The series continues with the third episode on September 4.

House of the Dragon, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO & HBO Max