(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.)
All month, I’ve been polling you, my readers, on how we think the summer’s biggest blockbusters will do when they eventually land on streaming, and I wanted to share the results. First up, how readers think The Odyssey will perform when it comes to Peacock…
People are pretty bullish that The Odyssey will smash it for Peacock. I don’t know that it will have as much rewatchability as Wicked did for kids, but we’ll see. It is now Universal’s highest-grossing film of all time.
One note: almost half of Christopher Nolan’s films weren’t available for streaming the week The Odyssey came to theaters, including some of his biggest films like Inception, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer and Insomnia. If you did want to watch the others, Prime Video had Memento and The Dark Knight trilogy, HBO Max only had The Dark Knight trilogy (even though Warner Bros. produced most of Nolan’s films), Hulu had The Prestige and Interstellar, and Paramount+ had Interstellar. So you needed at least two streaming subscriptions to catch the rest.
Warner Bros. whiffed right here. I know they have long term licensing deals, but they should have tried to get as many Nolan films on HBO Max for launch as possible.
Here are the results for Spider-Man: Brand New Day:
The audience is a bit more mixed on this one, with everyone agreeing Spider-Man will swing to a big opening, but not necessarily elite or best all time.
On to this week’s issue. Netflix continues searching for a hit straight-to-streaming summer film and Lioness and Ted Lassoallow me to look at the difference between a “hit” and a ‘hit for them”. All that, plus new YA/teen melodramas on Prime Video and Netflix, the House of the Dragon finale, USA Network claims a big opening, more big NFL ratings, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But we start with a fun new data announcement.
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, JustWatch and Reelgood interest 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 August 3rd to August 9th, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
A New Data Source: Reelgood’s Data on Content Libraries
Here’s a fun new treat for you. Reelgood—an online service and app that lets users track where shows or films are streaming—is providing data every month for the Streaming Ratings Report on the size of each streamer’s catalogue, along with the new shows and films for each streamer. Yay!
Previously, I had pulled “new shows on streamers premiering on the first of the month”:
While I liked that data cut, it was a big wonky since it didn’t show all of the new shows or movies that came to a streamer each month. Instead, I would have preferred something like this from Reelgood’s annual report:
And now we have it! I’m going to feature Reelgood’s data monthly, showing both total catalogue size and new shows and films appearing on the charts. That’s going to make these two cool new charts. First, here’s the size of various streamers’ film catalogues…
(By the way, Reelgood offered to make the charts for me, but I like doing that task by hand to understand the data better.)
They also provided data back to last year. Here’s the number of films timeline:
And here are the new films on each streamer for the month prior to Aug:
As I get used to this data, I plan to keep tinkering with how I display it, but I’m excited to feature it monthly. Today, I’m sharing the film charts; next issue, I’m going to feature TV shows by streamer.
Now, in full disclosure, Reelgood is a sponsor of this little-newsletter-that-could. But in my constant quest to figure out what streamer various shows and films are on, I was already a Reelgood user before this sponsorship. I go to their website all the time, and their data is very accurate on where shows are (or have been). Plus, I’ve been sharing their weekly top ten lists for years now, pre-sponsorship. For me, this is a great win-win, since I get to amplify a service I love, and I get a cool new data source to play with.
Now, normally folks don’t usually mention their sponsors directly, but as I wrote before, as I start featuring ads in my newsletter, I plan to be extremely open about who is sponsoring my writing so you can trust what I write.
Television – Two Big Returning Shows Look Set to Take Over The Charts
One key question when it comes to judging streaming shows is whether a show is a “hit” or a “hit for them”. To be clear, the former means a show that’s one of the top shows on streaming, no questions asked. The latter means a show is one of the biggest, for a given streamer. That distinction makes a big difference!
It’s really good to be one of the biggest shows on a streamer; it’s much better to be the biggest on streaming, despite the size of a streamer. Because, as we’ve seen now, nearly every streamer—while lacking the number of subscribers or usage of Netflix—can make hit TV shows:
- Paramount released Landman, whose first and second seasons were among the top two TV shows the year they came out.
- HBO Max’s The Pitt’s second season is the biggest show of the year so far.
- Love Island USA was the top show in 2025 for Peacock.
And, crucially for today’s discussion:
- Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy back in 2023, Ted Lasso was actually the top streaming show of the year according to Nielsen!
So even Apple TV (formerly +) can make hit shows. It just doesn’t make them that often. And looking at the Nielsen charts this week, we have two prime candidates for this discussion:
That’s right: Ted Lasso returned to Apple TV for its fourth season. Did it return in all its expected glory? Sure, though right now it’s still just a “hit for Apple TV”, but we’ll see how long it lasts on the charts. Its ten episodes are coming out weekly. (Smart choice, Apple!)
Ted Lasso started out strong, actually making the Nielsen charts the week before new episodes dropped, which is a rare feat. (Shows like Stranger Things or Bridgerton have pulled that off. That’s terrific company to join!) On Nielsen, it opened to 14.4 million hours in its first week, and 16.6 million the week of 10-Aug. Here’s how that compares to previous seasons:
Apple put out that this is their biggest TV launch through two days ever, and looking at the chart and Apple TV’s viewership history, I’d believe it. Here’s Apple’s top shows for season two and beyond:
Other data tells a (mostly) similar story. Ted Lasso made Samba TV and it has elite IMDb scores, an insane 8.7 on 465K reviews. The only outlier is Luminate, where the latest season only had 7.4 million hours, and no other seasons made the top ten. As you’ll see below, that’s well below some other solid, but not spectacular shows like Sterling Point, Ride or Dieor Furious. I’d be surprised if Ted Lasso isn’t bigger than those other shows, but it’s fine for different data sources to occasionally disagree.
And while it’s sucky to bring this up, given that Warner Bros. produced this show, I do wonder how the streaming wars may have been different if Ted Lasso landed on HBO Max initially instead of Apple. I don’t think one show can make or break a streamer, but given HBO’s brand, it could have helped bring people to that streamer much earlier in its lifespan. (Though yeah, I don’t love calling out executives for passing on hit shows, since that’s just the nature of the job. Even the absolute best execs will pass on lots of successful shows. The key is not greenlighting the under-performers/misses.)
The other show I’m thinking about in the “hit or hit for them” category is Lioness from Paramount+. Like Ted Lasso, its first season missed the charts, but it’s grown its audience since then. Here’s how season three opened:
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…
– How Lioness did on streaming…
– Two new melodramas for Netflix and Prime Video…
– Whether Netflix’s latest horror film saved its summer…
– Hulu’s Furious and Prime Video’s Ride or Die continuing their strong runs…
– The latest high profile showrunner to flop on streaming…
– All the flops, bombs and misses…
– And a whole lot more…
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
