(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.)
I know it’s going to be a good Streaming Ratings Report issue when I argue with my editor/researcher about what headline we should go with. We’ve got some big, big questions to answer today, like…
- Fresh off of his Emmy win, is Seth Rogen a hitmaker?
- Is Netflix giving up on the binge release strategy?
- When will Prime Video start putting films in theaters?
- Does brand new viewership data in the UK cast doubt on YouTube’s “views”?
- Is the NBA a “highlights league” as Adam Silver said last week? If so, why are they adding so many national games?
This week, I’m back with another double issue, mainly because I recently published two big, big streaming deep dives, listing out all the “flops, bombs and misses” on streaming TV and film. Why highlight all those misses? Because, frankly, too many people who work in this town don’t know what’s actually popular and what’s not.
But that’s not the only area I think we need to understand better as an industry. Looking at the list of things I want to write about, it’s way too long, including everything from quantifying the NBA’s media rights deal to putting A24 and Angel Studios’ finances in context to properly rating anime as a genre to debunking YouTube views to listing the latest TV show renewals to clarifying Hollywood’s real competition problems, and a whole lot more.
How can I write about all of that? I don’t know. I’m trying my best, but there’s only so much time in a week! If you’d like to read more of my takes on more subjects, please subscribe. I’d love to expand my staff, to get more time to do more writing, so if you like what I do, please subscribe.
Now it’s time to answer some of those spicy topics from above. But we’ll start by looking at four big swings and answer the question, “Are these hits?”
(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 August 4th to August 17th.)
Television – Hit or Miss? Wednesday, King of the Hill, Alien: Earth, Platonic, and Sausage Party: Foodtopia
Even though the number of new shows overall was down to start the month of August, the streamers took some big swings. So let’s play another round of “Hit or Miss?” We’ll start with three big swings, two from Hulu and one from Netflix, and then we’ll look at the Emmy darling of the moment to ask how his Apple TV+ and Prime Video shows have performed.
Let’s start with the obvious hit. Netflix released the first half of the second season of their utterly massive hit, Wednesday. I won’t pull any punches here.
This show is huge, even with only a scant four episodes this time around.
It did monster numbers. Samba TV had it up to 2.7 million households in the first five days, and it crushed it on Nielsen, with 62.5 million hours in its first week, the twelfth biggest single week since 2021 with room to spare to join the “40 million hour club”.
The only worry—and to be clear, I’m not worried—is that it will drop off fairly quickly, again, it only had four new episodes. You can see this compared to other massive season two outings:
In all, yeah, no duh, Wednesday is a big hit.
Alien: Earth, an FX show that’s also being heavily pushed on Hulu, looks like a hit too, though not in the same stratosphere as Wednesday. Here’s the data, with some of the caveats:
- It has an IMDb score of 7.6 on 40K reviews. That’s good for Hulu, but also for buzzy science fiction, we’d expect more total votes. But this score should go up over time, especially once the first season wraps up.
- It made Nielsen, but only at 7.7 million hours. Again, it’s good anytime a Hulu show with only two episodes makes Nielsen, but we’ll see how long it lasts on the charts.
- Disney’s datecdote said it premiered with 9.2 million “views” in the first six days. Over 9 million is a good number, but that’s a little longer time frame than some other points.
- Samba TV put out a datecdote that Alien: Earth had 1.8 million households watch in the first six days, and just on Hulu. That’s a great number for Hulu for Samba TV, and even better, the show actually grabbed first place on the Samba TV charts.
- We don’t have Luminate data, because Alien: Earth premiered on FX on the same day.
Add it all up and that’s a strong start for a weekly series. We’ll see if it holds that audience.
This time the last two years, Hulu released a reboot of a classic 1990s TV show, Futurama. They’re at it again this year with another classic animated TV series: King of the Hill. King of the Hill‘s performance is more mixed than Alien: Earth. First, this classic animated sitcom has a whopping fourteen seasons, so any of its numbers will be messy and a little high.
Take Nielsen. They pegged King of the Hill at 20.1 million hours in its first week, and then it dropped to 11.9 million hours. Notably, a Vulture report said that over 70% of the viewing was of the latest season. So that’s bigger than Alien: Earth, but then when it comes to datecdotes, Disney said it only had 4.4 million views, or half of Alien: Earth. Luminate is similarly muted, only 4.8 and 4.2 million hours, which is just above “big miss” territory for me. King of the Hill also missed Samba TV entirely.
Hulu has already greenlit another season, so presumably, they like this result, and since it’s animated, the next season should be cheap. But since they binge-released the latest season, unlike Alien: Earth, we likely won’t see King of the Hill on the charts for much longer.
Is Seth Rogen a Hitmaker?
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
- Whether Netflix has abandoned the binge…
- How all the “Trainwreck” film/TV series performed…
- A check-in on HBO’s big drama series The Gilded Age and And Just Like That…
- Some interesting data on YouTube “views” and viewership…
- The latest Prime Video film (starring a movie star) to not go to theaters…
- All the flops, bombs and misses over these two weeks…
- 12 more charts, tables and graphs…
- And a lot more…
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
