(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.)
Before we get into this week’s report, I wanted to highlight my new, gigantic resource, the EntStrategyGuy’s Entertainment Industry Dictionary…
…and why it matters to the Streaming Ratings Report. For example, in today’s article, a new show depicts a beautiful “Binge Release Curve”. Don’t know what that is? Just click the link to find out! I hope this dictionary makes the Streaming Ratings Report (and all my writing) a bit easier to follow, not to mention providing a larger resource to the FilmStack community at large. I’ll be including a link to this dictionary/glossary (as one reader recommended that I call it) at the bottom of the intro to every issue of the streaming Ratings Report. And send me your suggestions for future entries!
I also wanted to highlight another example of why this matters:
VOD
Often, I see other analysts use the acronym “VOD” to refer to PVOD or TVOD films and their viewership charts. Well, VOD means “video on demand” which, as I point out in that dictionary, includes SVOD (“streaming video on demand”, think Netflix), AVOD (“advertising video on demand, think YouTube), TVOD (“transactional video on demand”, think renting or buying films on Amazon or Apple), PVOD (“premium video on demand” or films that show up to rent or buy within 18 days of appearing in theaters), and so on. Even the FASTs (think Tubi and Roku Channel) have tons of “video-on-demand”, a super majority of their viewing. So the acronym “VOD” by itself isn’t the most accurate term, since it can refer to all/most streaming video. I think some analysts want to avoid confusion between PVOD and TVOD, but I’d just call it TVOD and lump premium and regular-priced offerings together.
I’d love to say that jargon doesn’t matter, and I don’t want to be a usage stickler—I get plenty of stuff wrong. After all, the “ratings” in “streaming Ratings Report” isn’t the most accurate term! —but even my very seasoned editor/researcher got confused after seeing so many other people use “VOD” differently from how I use it.
On to this week’s issue. It was a busy, busy two weeks with six big shows (Netflix’s Wednesday, Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, Netflix’s Beauty in Black, HBO’s Task, Peacock’s The Office spinoff, The Paper, and Paramount+’s NCIS: Tony & Ziva) along with Apple TV+’s latest straight-ish-to-streaming film, Highest 2 Lowest and Disney+’s Lilo & Stitch headed to Disney+. All that, plus the two biggest syndicated shows of all time head to streaming, an amazing visualization of the size of video games, all the flops, bombs and misses for the week, and a whole lot more.
But let’s start with the NFL!
(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, 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 September 1st to September 14th.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Sports Ratings of the Week – Return of the NFL!!!
The biggest show on American TV is back. I speak, of course, of THE National Football League, also known as America’s Game.
This report covers streaming, so I focus on the streaming-only football games. (Though I’ll provide a comparison to the broadcast games at the end.) Let’s start with Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football, which returned the second week of the NFL season, the week starting 8-Sep, featuring two relatively popular (and good) teams: the Washington Commanders and Green Bay Packers.
TNF topped the charts! Normally, I put my “top 30 Nielsen chart” at the end of the report, but here it is, to show you how it bested everything else on streaming in just one night:
It averaged 17.8 million viewers. I convert that to hours, and that means 45.5 million hours. That’s big enough to join the “40 Million Hour Club”. (You can see the updated 40-Million Hours club in the section on Wednesday” below.)
The big change, unfortunately, is that Nielsen is now publishing their “Big Data + Panel” data, which makes comparisons to previous seasons wonky. Or not “apples-to-apples”. (Definition here and here.) Now, I think Prime Video is growing its audience year-over-year anyways, but with the data change, it’s tough to know for sure.
Now, speaking of data, Amazon’s first Thursday Night Football game was technically the second streaming game of the year, the first being YouTube’s Friday Night Game. Yes, that YouTube, the largest source of streaming viewership on living room TVs according to Nielsen. And it did well, also breaking into the “40 million hour club”. Here’s how it stacks up compared to Amazon’s first game:
So, on the one hand, a reported 16.2 million average viewers still puts this game over many of the other previous streaming football games we’ve ever had, including Peacock’s exclusive last year. That partially makes sense because Peacock, in terms of usage, just doesn’t match YouTube. (Though Peacock’s playoff game earlier that year did particularly well, because, playoffs.)
On the other hand, Nielsen reportedly changed their calculation methodology for this game in particular. Even with that, YouTube later raised the number of viewers to 18.5 million, saying they miscalculated some viewership. Honestly, that change raised enough questions in my mind to not want to include this number period, but I did. It’s also unclear how YouTube handled all the alt-casts of the game, and whether you’d count those in the number anyways.
I’d add, even with those caveats, I still would have thought that YouTube’s NFL game would do better. It didn’t best Netflix’s Christmas Day games from last year, and I think that speaks to Netflix’s ability to drive viewership to specific shows, versus YouTube-wide usage across billions of videos. Also, Friday just isn’t the greatest night for live-sports viewership.
Last point: even with these changes, broadcast still looks to be the big winner. NBC’s kickoff game Thursday night averaged 28.3 million viewers, and would have been even higher but for a rain delay. Monday Night Football also broke records. The games averaged 22.1 million viewers across windows, so the YouTube and Prime Video games are clearly below that. According to Michael Mulvihill, “Week 1 NFL games on FOX, CBS, NBC and ABC/ESPN reached over 100 million viewers per Nielsen, a +21% gain over last year’s Week 1.” Again, some of this is due to the methodology change, but not all of it.
Here are the primetime games through the first week of the season compared to last year:
If I’m a sports league, that’s why I’d still prioritize dual (broadcast and streaming) or tri-cast (broadcast, cable and streaming) for sporting events just to expand reach. For example, we heard rumblings again that F1 may opt for a big Apple streaming TV deal. If I’m looking at these NFL numbers, I’d be worried.
Television – Round 2 of… “How Should You Release Your TV Show?”
Earlier this year, I covered all the shows of the week by their various release styles, noting we have almost as many different release styles as we have streamers. Once again, the two weeks I’m covering for this report—reminder, the weeks starting 1-Sep and 8-Sep—feature nearly every release style under the sun for a host of new and returning scripted TV shows.
(For definitions of the various release styles, might I recommend my “Entertainment Strategy Guy Entertainment Industry Dictionary” page? Yeah, I’m really proud of it, so I’m bringing it up a bunch…)
I thought of this because one show had a twist: the powers that be decided to change release formats for one show right before it came out. As many of my readers may have seen or read, Peacock’s The Paper—a spinoff of The Office from the same creative team—went from having a planned weekly release to a binge release.
It’s easy to lose the nuance in the “binge versus weekly” debate, and partially that’s because the debate is no longer a binary choice between two competing styles. In fact, most streamers tend to release even their weekly shows with three episodes available at launch, which I’ve taken to calling the batch-to-weekly release. I tend to favor weekly releases, but no streamer should use the same release style for all of their shows. Plus, I will add that inflexibility the other way (“we only binge release our shows”) also doesn’t make sense.
Now onto the shows, from most weekly to binge…
Weekly – Task
One new show came out in the traditional weekly release, which we see less and less often outside of broadcast or cable TV, and this show isn’t really a streaming show. I speak of HBO’s buzzy new Task, a crime thriller starring Mark Ruffalo. Since it premieres day-and-date on HBO, it’s not eligible for the Nielsen streaming originals charts nor Luminate’s weekly top ten list. But it did make Samba TV for one week in second place.
Like other HBO shows, we’ll see how long it lasts. HBO put out that Task had 3.1 million US viewers in the first three days, and that “first three days” number seems to be their new standard. They say that’s a top-five release for them since HBO Max started. If we get a few more datecdotes, I’ll make a bespoke chart.
Weekly releases definitely make sense for returning shows. Every fall, two shows return and make the charts for multiple weeks: The Great British Baking Show on Netflix and Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. Credit to these shows for their consistency. Has it paid off? Well, among “first run” shows—again, definition here!!!—they are both top in terms of total weeks on the Nielsen charts all time:
Batch-to-Weekly
As I mentioned above, rarely do the streamers put out a true weekly-released series, tending to start with two to four episodes to hook customers, then putting out episodes weekly. Like Paramount+’s latest, NCIS: Tony & Ziva, a spinoff, which came out of the gate with three episodes. It made Nielsen in its first week, which is actually a sign of growth for Paramount+ over time.
Tony & Ziva only had 6.2 million hours, and fell off the charts in its second week, so this may not be a Taylor Sheridan-sized hit. (If it were, Paramount might be on their way to a third column of content to rely on.) It only made Samba TV for one week in 10th place and has very low IMDb scores too, a 7.1 on only 2.8K reviews.
Batch – Wednesday
A “batch release” is when a streamer splits a mega-hit show into two or more roughly equal parts, released three to four weeks a part. It’s almost entirely a Netflix thing for now. Like how Netflix released their two biggest shows, Squid Game and Wednesday. In Wednesday’s case, the two batches came out with four-week gaps, and its second batch of episodes came out at the start of September, opening to 55.6 million hours, then fell to 34.5 million.
Listen, I don’t have any evidence that Netflix releases shows like this so they can avoid being accused of abandoning weekly releases…but I don’t know what else to say. I will say, though, the benefits of batched releases are the same as weekly releases, so call it “half a dozen one way; six in the other”.
Binge – The Paper and The Girlfriend
Let me clarify the EntStrategyGuy position on PR:
If you’re making business decisions to win the PR battles, you’ve lost the war.
Business decisions should be made for business reasons, and PR dealt with as a result of those decisions. If you believe a binge release will help a show’s prospects and hence your business, then you do it. Yes, streamers can possibly game the Nielsen charts by binge-releasing a show all at once, but that just doesn’t reach as many customers as streamers think. The reach you get among “the town” is real, but most people don’t know Nielsen even measures TV shows.
You release a show to reach and retain the widest audience. Period.
So Peacock binge-released The Paper, and it made the Nielsen charts for one week at 10th place for 5.7 million hours. For a binge-released series, that’s obviously not great.
Other numbers were also muted, with 9.4 million on Luminate in its second week, then falling off. Samba TV had it at 500K households watching in the first four days, which is fine for Peacock, but low overall. Why mention PR? Because if The Paper came out weekly, it wouldn’t have made the charts at all.
The Paper’s viewership numbers are better than Prime Video’s The Girlfriend, a binge-watched thriller from Robin Wright. It missed Nielsen and Samba TV, but did make Luminate, peaking at 10.6 million hours. At only six episodes, it’s tougher to make the charts, but still, these numbers didn’t wow me.
Regularly-Released Binge – Beauty in Black
One problem I have with some binge-released shows is that the gap between seasons seems to stretch out even longer, since episodes can’t come out until they’re all finished. Which is why Tyler Perry’s Beauty in Black is one of the most fascinating release styles going.
It’s definitely a binge-released show, with eight episodes at a time, but the team behind it has it on a schedule, putting out eight new episodes every six months.
And the strategy looks to be working, with big growth numbers for the latest season. Again, if you won’t release your show weekly, maybe consider this approach.
The Case for The Binge
Listen, I’m still team “weekly release” for most shows. In success, you want to build an audience via word of mouth, earned media and momentum. Binge-released shows struggle with that, since they come and go.
Yet, there is some data that binge can help. According to a Hub Intel survey, 64% customers prefer to watch shows when all of the episodes of a season are available. This is a huge argument in favor of releasing all new shows in a binge, though, to be fair, this is a one-off survey; I’d love to see these results over time.
But that still means that returning shows (like Wednesday and Only Murders in the Building), which don’t have discoverability issues, should come out weekly. Especially if I’m a non-Netflix streamer, I’d rather try to get customers to build the habit of logging into my streamer at least once a week.
Quick Notes on TV
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