(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.)
Obviously, the big news of the week (if not month) is Netflix letting go of executive Bela Bajaria, their chief content officer. I’m going to cover this in my next “Most Important Story of the Week”, but I also have a data angle that I might publish before then. (Too much news this month, am I right?)
But first, I have a bonus Streaming Ratings Report issue for you.
Today’s article is a bit of a grab bag of topics I’ve wanted to write about, but couldn’t squeeze into the (already very long) Streaming Ratings Report issues. The NFL drives huge viewership numbers, so I’ve got a look at that. A whole bunch of TV shows returned to the traditional broadcast channels, and I have thoughts. And I have a quick look at adult animated shows, since a couple flopped earlier this month. Plus, the Emmys aired earlier this month, and we got some fun data bout how popular those nominated shows are and why I’m not optimistic about the show’s future.
That’s a lot, so let’s dive right in.
Sports – Football Remains the King of Streaming
Over the last two Streaming Ratings Reports, I sorta ignored the biggest “show” each week. (I was tempted to say “piece of content” but I know that word bugs folks.) In my database, I call these “specials”, and they sure are special.
I speak of the king of American TV: football!!!
Streaming football is back and, unlike some other sports, it routinely dominates all viewership. Probably the best way to show this is to update one of my favorite graphics, the “40 Million Hour Club” since football games have joined that club each week they’ve premiered:
(Yep, that’s the data through 28-Sep, the first four weeks of the season. As a reminder, I take the average minute audience provided by Nielsen, factor out a percentage of linear TV viewers in home markets, and multiply the run time by the three-hour runtime.)
Again, the numbers are huge. Let’s start with Netflix. They grabbed the rights to the bonus opening week NFL Kickoff game (which was on YouTube last year) and it put up 18.5 million viewers on average. That nets out to 47.4 million hours of estimated streaming hours. That’s good! Though, notably, it’s well below Christmas Day games from previous years.
Compared to other streamers/broadcasters, that’s a bit of a mixed result. On one hand, Netflix’s 18.5 million average is about what YouTube claimed last year, though Nielsen used a bespoke methodology at that time, so I trust this viewership figure more. So that’s good. (The game also shifted from a Friday to a Thursday and that could have helped the viewership as well.) And Netflix continues to best Prime Video in total viewership—as you’ll see next—though Netflix has had much higher-profile (opening week and Christmas Day) games.
NBC/Peacock’s opening game the night before averaged 25.1 million average viewers, which is just much bigger than Netflix (or Prime Video). That’s the big caveat to all streaming viewership records: even in success, they can’t compete with traditional linear TV. Previously, I called this my “hierarchy of viewership”, and the data keeps supporting that thesis. The downside for NBC is that this game’s viewership was down compared to previous years, though it may be a counting issue. Here’s a great chart from Sports Media Watch:
Indeed, looking at all the opening week games across all windows, Netflix still lags the other primetime windows, but does well compared to the afternoon games:
I saw a few folks make the case that streamers still lag traditional broadcasters in reach, and I’d add they really lag compared to “broadcast plus streaming” options like NBC/Peacock, ESPN/Disney+ and CBS/Paramount+. The best data I saw for this came from Samba TV, who charted reach through the 2025 season, and, wow.
(Samba TV’s numbers are historically lower than Nielsen’s, so don’t compare their household figures to Nielsen’s hours, but use them as a proxy for the relative reach of the streamers.)
The good news is Prime Video is NOT having a down year. Their opening Thursday Night Football game reached 18.6 million viewers (about what Netflix got), but that’s a high for Prime Video on Thursdays and the biggest Thursday night game since 2015. The TNF games the weeks of 21-Sep and 28-Sep continued this streak, getting 43.1 (16.8 million average viewers) and 42.5 total hours (16.6 million average viewers), which were both up from last year. Still, that continues the (typical) season slide:
(For those new-to-streaming-football-numbers folks, the viewership declines for Thursday Night Football as the year goes along.)
Overall, it appears as if Prime Video is now part of the “football habit”, be it for customers at home or out at places like bars and restaurants. And its viewership is slowly catching up to broadcast. One last chart shows this. Last season, Nielsen started adding out-of-home viewership to the charts, so I try not to do season-to-season comparisons as I did for the first few years. And while Nielsen added Big Data viewing this year, I’m going to compare the last two seasons. Here’s that chart, which shows the season-over-season gains:
When it comes to streaming football, we have to keep a few seemingly contradictory thoughts in our head…
- First, streaming doesn’t come close to matching broadcast’s reach and, thus, viewership.
- Second, even with that gap, football is still the biggest “thing” on streaming. It’s very, very popular.
- Third, while some methodology changes have likely helped Prime Video’s numbers, their viewership does appear to be growing.
Lastly, yeah, the NFL started the season off poorly, with week one dragging down the numbers in year-over-year comparisons. However—and again, methodology changes may have helped this—the viewership grew compared to previous seasons over the next couple of weeks.
So football is still king. On streaming and off.
Television – Adult Animation Continues to NOT Make the Streaming Charts
In the last two reports, two adult-animated shows whiffed:
- Netflix’s animated comedy, Dang!
- Paramount+’s Sega-video-game-inspired fantasy/comedy, Golden Axe.
Neither made the charts, but that’s usually the case for animated shows. I mean, here’s literally every animated show that’s made the Nielsen Original charts since the start of 2025:
And one of those shows is Gabby’s Dollhouse! A kids show!
The problem with charts like this is that they don’t give you a sense of how many shows miss the charts. Netflix had at least eleven animated flops, including comedies like Big Mouth (a show everyone assumed was popular in the pre-Streaming Ratings Era), Long Story Short, Haunted Hotel, Mating Season, Strip Law, and Alley Cats, and action shows like Blood of Zeus, Castlevania: Nocturne, Devil May Cry, Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, and Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.
Prime Video had at least six animated misses, two in the same universe (Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss), three more comedies (#1 Happy Family USA, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy and Kevin) and an action show (The Mighty Nein).
Disney+ had MCU and Star Wars animated misses (Eyes of Wakanda, Marvel Zombies, Star Wars: Visions, Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord, and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld) but I can’t tell how many of those shows were geared towards adults. HBO Max had Harley Quinn and Hulu had Solar Opposites.
None of these shows made the charts! That’s a lot of misses!
If I remade the chart with all those misses, here’s how it would look:
Listen, I know the counter arguments. First, it’s cheaper to produce animated shows than live action. Fair enough, but with viewership this low, even that cheaper price point starts to not matter.
Second, just look at the acquired charts. Hit animated comedies can generate viewership for years! Shows like The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers do really, really well. Fair enough, but streaming has failed to recreate the dynamic that Fox has mastered so well. That’s a problem for streaming still.
Television – Emmys!
The annual Emmys broadcast was a few weeks ago, and I’ve got data on how the nominees performed on streaming, plus hot takes on this year’s viewership (and the big news about the broadcast’s, er, streamcast’s future).
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…
- The top Emmy-nominated shows…
- …why I’m worried about the future of the Emmys telecast…
- …the pros of broadcast television
- …and the cons…
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
If you want an idea of just how much content you’d get in a full issue, check out this older issue.
