(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.)
As I wrote in my recap of Beast Games earlier this week, we’ve got one last Streaming Ratings Report to finish reporting out 2024’s viewership data. (Reminder: Nielsen ratings come out four weeks later, plus the wildfires caused some more delays.)
To close out the year, the streamers took some big, big swings, so we’re talking Squid Game, the potential death of the batch release, the NFL Christmas Day games and why sports will increasingly dominate the streaming landscape. All that, plus Virgin River, Disney+’s What If…?, Juror #2, The Six Triple Eight, Christmas movies, the NBA on Christmas Day, and an intriguing rise in smaller film releases.
Let’s dive right in!
(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 December 16th to December 29th.)
(Quick Note on data: I received Luminate’s December 2024 data this week, and am still uploading it, so their charts will return next week. Also, I used some preliminary data in my article on Beast Games, but won’t use data from Nielsen past the week of 23-Dec, which is why some charts may look different.)
Sports – Netflix’s Monster NFL Ratings (For Streaming) Proves It Truly is Our Streaming Broadcast Channel
Before we dive into the latest NFL on streaming ratings, let me quickly debunk the absolute worst data comparison I saw in the last few months.
Specifically, a lot of people wanted to compare the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight to the Super Bowl, because the latter is widely acknowledged to be the biggest event on TV in America each year.
And nearly everyone got the Super Bowl number wrong!
See, most people went to Wikipedia and found the Nielsen-reported “average minute audience” of 121.5 million in America. Then they compared this to Netflix’s reported global viewership. But that comparison isn’t apples-to-apples, comparing a domestic viewership number to a global one. Luckily, if you just google “Super Bowl global viewership”…
You find out that 62.5 million more people watched globally. Or 184 million globally.
It was the second result of my search, yet so few outlets reported the US and international viewership for the Super Bowl!
I get it: when you discuss a Netflix accomplishment, hype is the name of the game, but shouldn’t you at least try to make the comparison apples-to-apples? All of which is to say, as we look at Netflix’s NFL games on Christmas Day, we need to make fair comparisons, not just look for hyperbole.
How Did The NFL Perform on Netflix?
With this performance, some hyperbole is warranted!
Let’s not bury the lede:
The NFL is the most popular sport in America and the most popular show on TV, on broadcast, cable or streaming.
That includes Netflix now. The week of 23-Dec, Netflix hosted two games on Christmas Day.
And Netflix made the NFL (on streaming) even bigger. Here’s the key comparison, looking at all streaming football games in 2024 through the week of 23-Dec:
Netflix is the biggest streamer in the U.S. with the most regular viewers, and when it pushed the NFL to its users, those users watched, to the tune of the biggest streaming performance we’ve seen yet in the regular season.
The only caveat—and who am I but a person who loves caveats?—is that we’ve seen that national holidays are a terrific time for football ratings, specifically the Thanksgiving Day games in the past and Christmas Day games last year. But Netflix almost reached the heights of broadcast TV last year.
If you want to know why I titled this section “Netflix is a broadcast channel” this is why. Unlike Prime Video, which struggles to match broadcast ratings with its Thursday Night Football airings, Netflix is on par with the Christmas games of last year. Netflix is a broadcast channel in terms of eyeballs.
(This also subtly explains why the Tyson-Paul fight was so big. When was the last time a boxing match aired on broadcast TV?)
Fine, I have two caveats. Interestingly, Netflix used Nielsen’s “big data” number, as Prime Video has been with Thursday Night Football this season. Initially, Nielsen told us 24.1 million folks watched the first game per minute, and then 24.3 million watched the second, and with a “big data” update, those numbers went up to 25.8 and 27.2 million hours respectively. These latter numbers resulted in total hours viewed on streaming (according to my estimates) of 66.1 and 69.7 million hours respectively. Apparently, Nielsen has been using this number with Thursday Night Football this year, and potentially some of the growth of Prime Video’s TNF in 2024 may be due to this data change, not organic growth.
Even with those caveats, these numbers are great, easily bigger than any Thursday Night Football game, and they even bested the playoff games on Peacock last year, the previous title holder.
Strategically, of course, this all amuses me. A few years back, I coined “Neverflix” to describe the things that Netflix would allegedly never do, including selling ads, buying sports rights, releasing series weekly, and putting films in theaters. They’ve now done the first two, kinda done the third at times (see my big section this week for why it’s “kinda” not “definitely”), but still firmly eschews the last option. Looking at these viewership totals, Netflix should have moved into live sports earlier.
But, But, But…What About the Global Viewership?
Sports leagues have said that they’re signing deals with Amazon and Netflix to expand their global footprint. (The NFL, NBA and WWE have all mentioned this.)
So is it working? In this case, I’ll say “meh”, since we don’t know, mainly because we don’t have NFL global ratings for non-playoff games. (At least that I could find.) We know that 5.2 million international folks watched the KC versus Pittsburgh game and another 4.1 million watched Baltimore versus Houston—or 16% and 13% respectively—but I don’t know if that’s high or low for an NFL game overseas. Plus, some of that viewership came from the NFL’s Global Pass, so we just don’t know how big of an improvement this is.
What About Amazon’s Thursday Night Football?
Well, Thursday Night Football just isn’t as big as the big holiday games. That’s the story this week, along with the general ebbing in interest as more teams are eliminated from playoff contention.
Amazon’s Thursday Night Football—which had games the week of 16-Dec and 23-Dec—didn’t come close to Netflix. For the game on 19-Dec, Amazon had the ability to flex a bad game out of the slot, and even pulling that trigger, they still saw ratings declines as both games averaged only 11.03 and 11.04 million viewers. These numbers were up from last year, but down to previous weeks.
Television – The Death of the Batch?
Squid Game is a big show.
I mean, not a little big. Like big big. Here’s my weekly chart “TV Ratings in the Last Six Weeks” where I DON’T cut off the chart at 45 million hours:
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