(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.)
To start the new year, the streamers didn’t put out very many new movies or TV shows. It was light. And I mean light. Is the pace of new shows and films brought on by the content slowdown finally happening? It’s something I’m going to look at later this month.
While there weren’t that many new titles, there’s still a lot to talk about, since a bunch of interesting shows came out over this two-week period, like two different procedurals, The Pitt on Max and On Call from Dick Wolf on Prime Video. And a rare not-Star-Wars-or-Marvel scripted TV show for Disney+, Goosebumps, returns along with Peacock’s biggest reality show, The Traitors…did it beat Beast Games? This week will also cover both the weeks of 30-Dec-2024 and 6-Jan-2025, since again there weren’t that many new titles across the board.
All that plus a ton of Warner Bros. films (very quietly) made their way to Netflix, which channel won the battle for New Year’s Eve (a live show that puts up great numbers), Wicked’s giant PVOD debut, a new sports league that had a great start, Landman and Squid Game both hitting records, two new Netflix shows, the Golden Globes’ ratings, all the flops, bombs and misses for the week, and a whole lot more.
Let’s dive 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 30th 2024 to January 12th 2025.)
Television – Give Me One Week for WWE Raw on Netflix, Cool?
On 6-Jan, one of WWE’s two flagship weekly shows moved to Netflix. I speak of Raw or Monday Night Raw. Netflix pulled out all the stops, inviting many journalists to watch the Los Angeles show for free. (I, for some reason, was not invited…)
Anyways…should I look at the data? Tell you how it did?
As a reminder, the show still pulls a majority of its viewing in America. So let’s pull out the data:
[[[INSERT CHART HERE]]]
Huh?
According to the American streaming ratings charts I track—Nielsen, Samba TV and Luminate—WWE Raw didn’t make the top ten. Of the three, Nielsen told me that Raw is eligible on the “acquired charts”, and that’s naturally a harder bar to clear, especially since Raw doesn’t have a lot of catch-up viewing. For example, the week of 6-Jan, to make the charts, Raw would have had to best NCIS at 9.9 million hours. So if RAW ran for 3 hours in its first week, but only had 2 million viewers, that’s not enough to make it.
So here’s the plan: I’m going to look at the global numbers next week (while waiting to see if maybe it breaks into a top ten list). We can still glean some insights into WWE, but not as many as we’d like.
Television – Here Come the Streaming Procedurals…
This week, a big theory of mine got put to the test:
Do customers still want procedurals?
On streaming, I mean. On broadcast TV, ain’t nothing wrong with procedurals, many of which rack up more hours viewed in one episode than some streaming originals get over their entire runs. (Quick definition: a “procedural” is an episodic drama TV show, usually an hour long, which features self-contained episodes that tend to solve a mystery/murder or cure a life-threatening disease.) Same for streaming. procedurals and sitcoms dominate the Nielsen acquired TV charts, partially due to their incredible total number of episodes. Here’s the Nielsen acquired charts with total hours viewed going back to 2021:
Yet streaming has had a dearth of true Original procedurals hit the platform. Off the top of my head, Peacock’s Poker Face is the only other show I can think of where the protagonist solves a mystery each week. (Paramount+ also moved Evil, Criminal Minds and SEAL Team to streaming.) But
If the medium is the message, so far, the message is: avoid Original streaming TV shows that solve a weekly mystery.
Until now!
The week of 6-Jan featured not one but two (2!) procedurals, from two experts of the craft:
- The Pitt on Max. A medical procedural from the creative team behind ER starring Noah Wyle of ER.
- On Call on Prime Video. A police procedural from Dick Wolf, the creative mind behind Law & Order and the Chicago shows.
So…hits or not?
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