(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.)
It just makes my day whenever I get quoted in another outlet, so indulge me in some self-congratulation as I highlight some recent shoutouts and appearances of yours truly…
- People seemed to really enjoy my deep dive into Beast Games. Mike Shields at Next in Media and now Next in Creator Media took a look at the ratings, and cited my conclusions. Check it out! Another Substack newsletter, Business of TV, also analyzed Beast Games (and made a very interesting point about Indian viewership, though Indian customers have a notoriously low average revenue per user), and cited my work as well, so check that out too! The New York Times (the New York friggin’ Times!) cited my Beast Games work in an article about television ratings. This is almost certainly a first for me!
- Next, I should have mentioned this last issue, but I didn’t see that the article had gone out (thank Google News for not tracking The Ringer…) but The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh (one of my favs) and Rob Arthur wrote a long article on what’s taking so long for new seasons of TV shows to come out (something I just wrote about last week…) and Ben interviewed me. It’s a great article so check it out. Also, on Tuesday The Ringer analyzed Beast Games and cited my work. It’s also a great read!
On to this week’s issue and there’s a lot to go over, including not one, but two (two!) Apple TV+ shows making the charts, Back in Action’s big opening, Squid Game and Landman both continuing their monumental runs, a cartoon miss on streaming, gigantic numbers for college football, the inflation of Rotten Tomatoes scores over time, Emilia Perez’appearance on a viewership chart, and more. Reminder: I looked at WWE Raw’s appearance on Netflix yesterday in its own article.
Let’s dive 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 January 13th to January 19th.)
Television – Apple TV+ Sets a Nielsen Record!
Well, we’ve never seen this before:
That’s two—count ‘em 2!!!—Apple TV+ originals in the top ten Nielsen charts for the first time ever. It’s two sophomore seasons, one of Silo—which started back in November—and Severance, which just premiered on 17-Jan.
(To be fair, Apple had two entries in the top 30—both film and TV—twice before, once with Ghosted and Ted Lasso and once with Finch and Ted Lasso, but this is the first time with two TV shows)
I had noted just two weeks ago that Apple TV+ hadn’t released a new show in a while, and now Apple TV+ has two hits at the same time. The usual caveats apply here, in that the “hits” for Apple TV+ still wouldn’t be huge hits for other streamers. Of course, that stems from their lack of size. But let’s not undersell Severance: it has elite IMDb scores (an 8.7 on over 250K reviews) and now the viewership to match.
Still, somewhat like Paramount+, Apple is putting out two successful sophomore seasons weekly, back-to-back, and should benefit from increased engagement from it. I’m particularly curious to see how long Severance lasts on the charts. Interestingly, before the second season premiere, Apple licensed the debut season to The Roku Channel to boost awareness, a strategy I like.
Quick Notes on TV
- The second season of XO, Kitty—a binge-released half-hour YA dramedy—did fine, getting to 9.1 million hours on Nielsen. Again, that’s fine for a half-hour series, but also not world beating numbers either. Meanwhile, the reality series I Am a Killer made the Nielsen charts in its second week, after missing in its first.
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