(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.)
At the end of December, Freevee (Prime Video’s AVOD/free streaming service, formerly the very awkwardly named IMDb TV) came to an end, but its shows live on!
Like Tribunal Justice, where a trio of judges rules on civil cases à la The People’s Court or Judge Judy. Its second season debuted last month and…its episodes are still free! And coming out daily. I’d bet a fair bit that the contract was written this way, but regardless, I can’t wait to see which shows survive and in what form and what they cost to users.
In the end, Tribunal Justice didn’t make the ratings charts this week, as you’ll read below. I still don’t love Prime Video’s awkward UX, since users never quite know if something is free, only free if you’re an Amazon Prime member, or available to be bought or rented. Or if the show is from some other streamer entirely, like Paramount+ or Apple TV+ now. I’ve griped about that for years, though.
The theme of the week was spies, which I covered on Wednesday. And today we’ll start with another secret agent-adjacent TV show that is off to a strong start. On the film side, a few big-ish theatrical titles made their way to streaming to battle with a new comedy that features some A-List stars on Prime Video. All that, plus Paramount+ has a huge hit show and big time Star Trek film flop, logarithmic returns at work, Trump’s inauguration ratings, another documentary on OJ Simpson, the return of Trump ratings, all the flops, bombs and misses 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 January 20th to February 2nd.)
Television
I did a mini-dive into spy films and movies earlier this week. I debated including the other big scripted release of the week, but ultimately left it out. I speak of Hulu’s Paradise, starring the excellent Sterling K Brown who’s re-teaming with This is Us creator Dan Fogelman.
Hulu released two episodes on 28-Jan and the show made Nielsen with 9.2 million hours the week of 27-Jan. It did well on Samba TV too, getting up to third place overall. Here are all of the Hulu season one series that made the charts:
Plus we got a Disney “datecdote” that Paradise had 7 million views in the first nine days (another weird time frame from them, which is par for the course at this point from Disney PR).
In the case of this show, I think the performance actually matches the online buzz!
Is this a “hit for them” but not a true hit? Maybe. Hulu’s already renewed it, so they must like its performance. It’s a weekly show, so the long term performance will also matter, but this is a strong start. Hulu actually moved this release from a Tuesday release to a Sunday, which is interesting, because we haven’t seen a lot of Hulu shows come out on a Sunday.
That said, the big issue is still hit-rate. Here are all of the Hulu shows in my database for the second half of the year (TV, English-language, for adults):
Frankly, that’s not a great hit-rate!
Quick Notes on TV
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