(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.)
Recently, my researcher/editor and I kept going back and forth over the branding for a bunch of Prime Video shows (hence why I at first described My Lady Jane as a “Freevee” show) and then we realized:
Almost every show on Prime Video is now marked as a “Freevee” show.
Clearly, someone on the Prime Video UX team set it up to automatically brand every show with free episodes on Freevee as a “Freevee” show, even if those shows only have one or two episodes available for free. Like these Amazon Originals:
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Both of those shows only have one or two episodes on Freevee; the rest require a Prime subscription. As a branding exercise, I’m surprised that no one has caught this slip-up yet. (It seems like it would really confuse/frustrate customers.) Or it speaks to the increasing indistinguishability of Prime Video and Freevee.
As a business strategy, though, it’s smart to offer free samples. After all, I provide a free sample with almost every streaming ratings report.
But not today. Today, this whole issue is free to all subscribers. (And feel free to share it far and wide.) I want to give non-subscribers a sense of how long and detailed each issue of the Streaming Ratings Report is, especially the extra sections at the end, so be sure to check out the whole thing As one executive (the head of one of the streamers) recently emailed me, my analysis is “the best and most rigorous of all trade reporting by far”.
Overall, this week was fairly average, if not a pinch light, probably due to (some) streamers quite smartly avoiding the Olympics. (Like I wrote last week, that thing is a juggernaut.) After all, does an Apple TV+ Matt Damon/Casey Affleck film move the needle? Not really. Same goes for new shows like The Umbrella Academy on Netflix and Mr. Throwback on Peacock. So I want to take this chance to revisit the big genre shows of the summer, especially since so many came out weekly, including one particularly bad headline. But we’ll start with Nielsen’s monthly The Gauge report, and what it tells us about one social video platform in particular…
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, 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 Aug 5th to Aug 11th.)
How Big Is Twitch?
Most months, the share of TV viewership remains very, very stable. That’s the major takeaway from three years of Nielsen’s “The Gauge”, their summary of TV viewership on living room TVs by streamers. Customers tend to have their favorite shows, networks, and streamers, and they don’t bounce around as much as you’d guess. For the most part, streamers stay within 1% of their usual share of viewing.
But every so often, if we look, we can find fun cool stories.
Wait, the live video streaming platform owned by Amazon is worth more than the market capitalization (but not enterprise value!) of many traditional entertainment companies…put together?!?!?
That seems unbelievable, as in I literally don’t believe that.
So I looked for some data. Maybe this stock analyst had seen something I’d missed. And I naturally thought of Nielsen’s The Gauge. Now, The Gauge doesn’t cover mobile devices or computers, but living room TVs do provide a good proxy for penetration overall. I mean, YouTube is the biggest streamer of any type on the Gauge each month! (And the one streamer that has seen growth above 1%.)
Unfortunately, as you can see, Nielsen doesn’t report Twitch’s numbers:
But wait! One of the improvements Nielsen made to The Gauge was to add a “Distributor” analysis, to incorporate broadcast and cable viewership by all media companies. So look at Prime Video’s percentage above (and remember it includes Amazon Freevee!!!), and look at the one below:
There’s a discrepancy! Amazon’s distributor gauge is bigger by the tiniest of tiny margins, 0.1%. (Not 1%, mind you, but ten percent of 1%, or 0.1%.) Here’s the thing: I confirmed with Nielsen that Twitch viewing is included in that 0.1%! That’s the absolute ceiling for the size of Twitch on living room TVs.
In other words, Twitch is less than 1% the size of YouTube on TV screens. Heck, it’s 21 times smaller than Disney+! And 37 times smaller than Hulu!
By the way, we don’t just have to take Nielsen’s word for this. Here’s an analysis of social media platforms by user from the Neely Center for media that I made for The Ankler last year:
In other words, Twitch is the smallest social media platform by far, as only 3% of American adults use it. (It may be higher among kids.)
And it’s not like Twitch is some hot new streaming service; it’s more than ten years old! Rumors are they’ve never been profitable and they fired at least 500 workers, 25% of their workforce, earlier this year. I know some people watch Twitch constantly, but all the publicly-available data indicates that they’re a pretty small tech platform and not a profitable one either, even with Amazon’s support.
Again, run the “Quibi Challenge” to keep yourself honest: how many Quibi’s has Amazon spent on Twitch? Analysts/observers can’t have it both ways; Quibi can’t have been a terrible idea because they ran out of money, but Twitch a brilliant one because Amazon funds the losses. If they both lose money, they both lose money.
I’m sure many more people will see headlines about Twitch’s gaudy valuation by one analyst than see this sober, realistic appraisal. Frankly, there’s no universe where Twitch is worth more than most traditional entertainment companies.
Television – Big Summer Genre Showdown Check In
I try to remind myself to check in on weekly-released TV series. With the week-to-week nature of this newsletter, it’s easy to focus on “launches” and tougher to remember that the full run matters more.
This summer was dominated by a couple of those shows. While the summer isn’t over, most of the big June releases have ended their runs, so we can look back for some streaming lessons.
Let’s start with the high-level overview, with two looks. First, here’s the “by week” look. I like this because it shows how spread out some shows are versus the big drop-offs of others.
But some folks like total hours, because they’re simpler to read, so here’s that:
Still the Winner – Bridgerton
As you can see, Bridgerton came out and just crushed the ratings, especially compared to some other recently-released, multi-season shows like Cobra Kai and The Umbrella Academy.
Is Shonda Rhimes officially the best showrunner in H*Town? Maybe!
I’d add, the split release strategy for Bridgerton seems like a massive success, as it was for Stranger Things. I expect Netflix to continue doing this with returning shows, and maybe even double down by splitting up its seasons even more into three (or more?) batches. (Indeed, the split batches are possibly why Cobra Kai’s release looks so muted, then again, Bridgerton had a split release too…)
By the way, Netflix released another “genre” show this week (of 5-Aug), the fourth and final season of the superhero comedy-drama The Umbrella Academy. Its latest season opened to 24.3 million hours, which is good, but a bit down compared to past seasons. Like many recent Netflix originals, it had a big gap between seasons, two years in this case. It also bucked the “split seasons” trend, since it only has six episodes.
Second Place – Still a Tie Between The Boys and House of the Dragon
I’m sorry, I want to declare a winner here, but I think both of these shows just did really well.
HoTD also did well on Samba TV, taking the top spot on the Samba TV charts for six weeks in a row. (As a head’s up, Nielsen lowered the number of streaming hours for House of the Dragon for the weeks of 1-July and 8-July, by about 2 million hours each week.)
There’s also somewhat of a data discrepancy on whether HoTD is gaining or losing strength. Samba TV shows some signs of a drop off in terms of unique households watching (see below), but HBO’s internal data showed the season finale was up compared to the premiere:
In other words, this is still HBO’s biggest show. Overall, I’d prefer it if a show gained audience over time (that’s what Game of Thrones did, hence why it’s one of the greatest shows in TV history), but that’s tough to achieve.
Other Genre Show Thoughts
Let’s do a quick rundown of the other shows that vied for the genre crown, using a pretty loose definition of “genre”:
- As for Disney, I just declared The Acolyte Disney’s biggest bomb of the half year, and the data backs that up. Now, I had missed a datecdote that The Acolyte had Disney’s biggest debut in terms of “views” over the first five days in 2023, but that data backs up that The Acolyte did drop from Ahsoka in 2023. (And that Disney is not having a great 2024.) Overall, this show just didn’t hook viewers.
- But Disney still has The Bear (on Hulu via FX), which still made the Nielsen charts for six weeks.
- Peacock’s Those About To Die never made it back on the charts after its second week. Its ceiling is a “hit for them”.
- Presumed Innocent—the show of the summer for some critics—ended up with one week on the Nielsen charts, though many more on Luminate. It’s definitely one of Apple TV+’s hits.
Let’s Cast Our Sauron-Eye to…LoTR
Big Genre Summer will continue since Prime Video’s Amazon Studios’ Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power – This Title is Long just started its second season. As always, I like to wait until all the data comes in from everyone before judging.
But I know many folks saw the headline that the latest season was down 50% compared to season one, per Samba TV. Actually, they noted a similar decline for House of the Dragon too, but that show still dominated the streaming ratings chart.
As always, let’s wait for all the data, to have the fullest picture to judge. And yes, that will include ignoring vague datecdotes, which lead to very awkward headlines like this:
Quick Notes on TV
- For all their travails in the kids animation space, Netflix has one big hit in Gabby’s Dollhouse. (Caveat: it’s produced by DreamWorks, so it’s owned by Universal, which explains both why a movie is coming to theaters and why their merchandising is so much better than other Netflix properties.) Now, the numbers for a kids TV series don’t come close to the peaks of adult shows, and just making the charts is an accomplishment, something Gabby’s Dollhouse has been great at. Its tenth season came out on 5-Aug, and it showed back up in the top ten.
- Another super long Spanish language series made the top ten, Love of My Life from Columbia. It has a whopping 60 episodes in its first season. It missed the charts last week, but showed up this week with 4.7 million hours.
- Love is Blind is Netflix’s best-performing reality series, and thus Netflix has expanded the franchise, as the UK version dropped on 7-Aug. It missed the Nielsen charts this week, but made Luminate, though on the low end for those charts.
- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder had a tiny binge release curve, still not eclipsing 10.0 million hours in its second week. That’s below the Obliterated line, so depending on its ownership situation—it looks like it’s a co-production with the BBC—I wonder if we see any more seasons. (If it does get cancelled, I’m sure we’ll be told it was a limited series, but right now it doesn’t seem to be branded that way.) Meanwhile, Evil has been insanely consistent in its viewership week-to-week. While it definitely benefits from a Netflix bounce, this consistency likely speaks to some Paramount+ viewership too. Meanwhile, Unsolved Mysteries made it to a second week.
- Another Paramount show arrived on Netflix, Fire Country, an action-procedural that airs on CBS first. Prison Break had a big jump to 26.7 million hours, the top show of the week. Meanwhile, the SpongeBob TV series has continued to make the charts, likely boosted by its new movie on Netflix.
- Speaking of Freevee, I’m not sure how Judy Justice did on Freevee (and to be clear, this actually is a Freevee show), since Samba TV, Nielsen or Luminate don’t track Freevee. It can make the Showlabs charts, but hasn’t yet, though past seasons have made those charts. Overall, I’m not worried about this show, but it doesn’t hit the ratings charts like some other big shows.
- We’ve got two misses of the week this week. First up is Peacock’s Mr. Throwback, starring Steph Curry, Ego Nwodim, and Adam Pally. This show got some of the weirdest datecdotes I’ve ever seen, like Deadline reporting that it’s Peacock’s fifth biggest comedy. Out of 19. Or Puck reporting that it “ranked #1 on Peacock [Saturday], reaching more accounts than all other series on the platform.” I mean, yeah, that’s like the floor for success for a scripted streaming show. To be fair, Mr. Throwback made the Samba TV charts for one week, and it’s probably too short (with just six episodes) to make the Luminate or Nielsen charts. But on IMDb, it had less than 600 reviews, which is horrible. Remember when Steph made all those game-winning shots in the gold medal game at the Olympics? 600 reviews on IMDb for a scripted show is basically the exact opposite of that. It’s more like JR Smith in the 2018 NBA Finals.
- Next up, Paramount+’s SEAL Team, our “Dog Not Barking” (my term for any show that doesn’t make any of the ratings charts that we track, find an explainer here) of the week. It made TV Time, but nothing else. This show is coming out weekly, but I want to see it do a bit better on some other, non-interest metrics. I’ll admit, this is a mark against my “make more procedurals” thesis.
- Other misses include The Mallorca Files on Prime Video, a UK police show that only nabbed 500K unique viewers on Showlabs, which is low. (For context, Batman: Caped Crusader had 1.6 million.) Blue Ribbon Baking Championship, a Netflix baking competition hosted by Jason Biggs (Get it? Baking? Pies? Remember American Pie? It’s a funny reference for Millennials and older), only made Luminate at 2.7 million hours, which is a miss. Other DNBs for this week include Hulu’s Dance Moms: A New Era, and a bunch of true crime shows like Paramount+’s PD True, Hulu’s At Witt’s End – The Hunt for a Killer, and Max’s Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth. Finally, I don’t usually mention kids shows, but two pieces of returning IP, Apple TV+’s Yo Gabba GabbaLand and Paramount+’s Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, didn’t make the charts. (But kids shows usually don’t make the charts, Gabby’s Dollhouse above being the exception that proves the rule.)
- I can confirm all of last week’s DNBs, most notably Rob Lowe and Netflix’s Unstable, but also Prime Video’s Influenced and Pokemon: Trainer Tour, Apple TV+’s Cowboy Cartel, and Hulu’s Betrayal.
Film – The Instigators Has a Mixed Release…Which Shows All of Apple TV+’s Problems
When The Instigators came out, two friends of the newsletter—and Twitter provocateurs, if I can call them that without them getting offended—argued about the relative merits of Prime Video’s Road House and Apple TV+’s The Instigators.
Now, they cared about the relative quality of the films, but that’s not what I do here. So I asked if The Instigators—which seemed buzzy and heavily marketed—would be a “dog not barking”—my term for a show that missed all the charts.
The good news? It’s not a dog not barking. It just barely made the charts.
The bad news? It’s at the slimmest of margins.
First, here’s the Nielsen charts, my gold standard for viewing; it missed them entirely:
Second, here’s the Samba TV charts:
That’s good! Well, fine.
The Instigators also made the Luminate charts (at 6.2 million hours in its first week). That’s on the lower side, but again it’s Apple TV+. The better news is that it crushed it on IMDb, with 23K reviews as this issue goes to press. (Though with a below average 6.2 rating.)
So…huge hit? Hardly.
Yes, yes, Apple TV+ is the smallest streamer. But The Instigators barely made Samba TV and did just “fine” on Luminate. (Descendants: The Rise of Red had 18 million hours viewed on Luminate.) Most theatrical films do much better than that, even on smaller streamers like Peacock and Paramount+. Not to mention, I saw a ton of marketing for this one, so it’s not like Apple even benefitted from the “we skipped theaters to save on marketing dollars” scenario.
In other words, in terms of viewership, Road House drop-kicked The Instigators. The real loser is Doug Liman, who needs to stop having his mid-budget-sized films get sent straight-to-streaming.
The Most Accurate Subscriber Datecdote We’ve Ever Had?
I do want to call out one specific tidbit. I can’t find the source for this, but there are reports that The Instigators drove 50K new subscribers for Apple TV+.
And that’s the most accurate subscriber attribution I’ve ever seen.
Most people will think it sounds really low—and it is!—but most shows and films, even the best performing, just can’t count for that many additional subscribers. The reason is because a service only has so many people and if you attribute a new subscriber to a show, YOU CAN’T EVER ATTRIBUTE THEM AGAIN. Sorry to capslock there, but folks make this mistake a lot.
If you attribute, say, tgree million subscribers to The Instigator, and two million to Killers of the Flower Moon, that’s five million allocated, but remember they can’t be the same, since you’ve already attributed them. Meanwhile, if you attributed five million subscribers to Ted Lasso a year ago, then suddenly we’re at 10 million subscribers for a service with maybe 15 million in the U.S. In other words, we’re going to run out of subscribers to attribute! I could go on, but it would be weird to say, “Hey, your show did well, but we don’t have any more subscribers left to attribute to it.”
In other words, 50,000 seems low, but accurate. And if you assume the average subscriber hangs around Apple TV+ for a year (Seems fair to me, given their +6% churn rate) and say after costs Apple makes about $8 per month (minus some sales costs)…you’re at $4.8 million of revenue for this film. (To be clear, CLV times attributed subscribers is an EntStrategyGuy approved valuation method.)
Man, that’s not a lot of revenue compared to box office…
Quick Notes on Film
- For another week, none of the streamers released a stand-up special. This honestly doesn’t happen much—for example, Netflix released a Joe Rogan special last week—but it’s absolutely happening more often.
- The big winner on the Luminate charts this week was Inside The Mind of a Dog, a Netflix documentary on, well, dogs. It made the charts for two weeks, at 3.4 and 1.3 million hours, which is on the low end, but also fine for a documentary. The Tubi original Robbin, meanwhile, made the charts for two weeks, but both were under 1 million hours, which is low. Robbin only has 132 IMDb reviews, which is incredibly low.
- Here’s a crazy one: Descendants: The Rise of Red showed back up on the 5-Aug Samba TV charts. (It’s stayed on the Luminate charts.) It’s very, very, very rare for an original film to fall off the charts and show back up. Part of this may be the general lack of new releases, but it’s a good sign for Disney that they have a success in this latest entry in the Descendants franchise. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes dropped to 7.3 million, from 9.3 million. Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie also dropped, down to 5.9 million hours. Meanwhile, Trolls Band Together made it to its fourth week.
- The biggest theatrical disappointment this week is The Bikeriders, a prestige drama about a motorcycle “gang”. It only made $21 million at the domestic box office, so hopes were never high, but it missed the ratings charts. Like The Instigators, it made a couple of interest charts, like Reelgood and Just Watch, but interest doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t translate into viewership.
- Our “Miss of the Week” is One Fast Move, sort of by default, a straight-to-streaming Prime Video sports/romance film that’s also about motorcycles, in this case, a small town motorcycle racer who reunites with his estranged father and falls in love. Despite a fair number of racing scenes, the budget on this seems pretty low; aside from Edward James Olmos, there are no stars. Overall, this isn’t a huge miss. The other DNB for this week was a South African crime comedy on Prime Video, The Shakedown.
- I confirm all of last week’s DNBs, all from Netflix, including their latest live standup special, Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats, both director’s cuts of Rebel Moon (I can’t imagine how much Netflix has lost on this franchise), Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, and Modern Masters: SS Rajamouli.
Datecdote of the Week – YouTube’s Share of the Kids Market
Mike Shields recently asked a fascinating question: how much of YouTube’s viewership is kids viewership? According to Nielsen, 20.5% of kids viewers are aged 2-11 and another 8.4% is 12-17. (Compared to 20.5% of TV viewership overall.) I also appreciated that he double-checked this with another analytics company, since according to TVision, that number is only 13%.
Anecdata of the Week – Parrot Analytics Bi-Annual Demand Updates
Parrot Analytics put out their quarterly “Report Card”, and as always, there are some real gems of charts in there. Perhaps my favorite was this one on TV show demand by corporate owner:
I think few people around town realize how much the legacy studios still demand in terms of interest. And this doesn’t even include library film titles. Speaking of, I loved this image on catalogue demand, which supports my hypothesis that for most of the streamers, customers want to watch their favorite broadcast and cable shows (which the broadcast channels are cutting back on making).
Linear Ratings of the Week
Disney decided to put its Disney+ doc from Ron Howard, Jim Henson: Idea Man garnered 1.4 million viewers on ABC, but it was contending with the Olympics in prime time. As always, I like the dual-cast strategy.
Coming Soon!
Next week, things get super duper busy, with a ton of big returning shows (Netflix’s Emily in Paris! Peacock’s Bel-Air! Hulu’s Solar Opposites! Paramount+’s RuPaul’s Drag Race Global All-Stars!) and Apple TV+ might have a hit on its hands with Bad Monkey starring Vince Vaughn. And there’s a bunch of new films including Netflix’s straight-to-streaming action comedy, The Union, starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry versus Prime Video’s straight-to-streaming action comedy, Jackpot! starring Awkwafina and John Cena. Plus Matt Rife has a new comedy special where he does crowd work.
Later this month, all the theatrical movies are headed to streaming, including A Quiet Place: Day One going to Paramount+, Kinds of Kindness to Hulu, and The Fall Guy to Peacock. Netflix has a new horror film, The Deliverance, from Lee Daniels, and Apple TV+ has a director’s cut of Napoleon.
And Only Murders in the Building faces off against The Rings of Power. Who will win?
Long term, I loved this news: there’s a new John Wick TV show coming, a sequel to the franchise, but this time it’s actually from Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski! Peacock’s The Continental didn’t resonate, but I bet that this one does.
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