(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
Outside of two big new movies (one from theaters; one straight-to-streaming), the streamers really pulled back on big new originals this week, releasing only three new unscripted shows for adults and one kids show. That’s an insanely light output, even compared to the light output of recent months due to the 2023 production slowdown and this year’s content pullback. This usually happens whenever there’s a big holiday weekend in the US.
Yet Nielsen graced us with the news that this is the biggest week of viewership on streaming platforms they’ve ever—EVER!—recorded.
What explains this discrepancy? Well, it was a holiday weekend, so TV viewing in general increased.
It also turns out nearly every streamer has a hit streaming show right now. We’ll look at the big shows driving this boom—Bridgerton, The Boys, House of the Dragon, The Bear—and two flops, along with a new Netflix film from a very old franchise that grabbed big numbers. All that, plus Godzilla x Kong topping the Max charts, the new docu-series that made the charts, Just Watch’s latest market share charts, Peacock’s surprising hit show, some flops, bombs and misses of the week (there weren’t many) and more.
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, and Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of July 1st to July 7th.)
Television – Genre+ Wars Check In – Winners Still Winning!!!
Knowing that we had this lull coming up, I mostly didn’t write about the shows I included in my “June’s Big Genre Showdown” in the last issue of the Streaming Ratings Report—Bridgerton (on Netflix), House of the Dragon (on Max) The Boys (on Prime Video), The Acolyte (on Disney+) and Sweet Tooth (on Netflix)—so I could check in on them again today.
Here’s a head-to-head comparison, with a few slightly-less-genre titles that are also smashing it:
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