(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.)
The big data news for the end of August is that Nielsen is finally rolling out a “new era”—their words, obviously—of data collection, combining their “big data” panel with their traditional consumer panel data. The biggest impact will be to boost viewership numbers across the board. Nielsen started publishing data from this new measurement system last fall for Amazon’s Thursday Night Football games, and it seemed like it contributed to a boost in viewership numbers.
Past Nielsen data changes have had similar viewership-boosting effects. When Nielsen added “out-of-home” viewership earlier this decade, it boosted all sports viewership, making comparisons to pre-2020 numbers less “apples-to-apples”. (If I had a Nielsen subscription, I’d ask to get all three numbers, but as a reminder, for this report, I only use publicly-available data.)
As for my take on this change, I think it’s fine. If Nielsen thinks the “big data” addition makes their data more accurate, I’m all for it. However, their consumer panel provides a unique value-add to their data, and more than anything, that’s why I trust Nielsen data more than any “digital-only” metrics. For example, CTV and social video fraud are known issues for advertisers; a real-world panel by definition doesn’t track those fake views.
On to this week’s streaming content. We had two moderately full weeks of streaming TV in a row, which makes this a fairly loaded (and super fun!) report. We’ll look at…
- …how many weeks Animal Kingdom, Paw Patrol and Gunsmoke have made the charts this year…
- …KPop Demon Hunters to see if it has passed Encanto as streaming’s biggest film…
- …whether Jerry Jones can dominate the docu-series charts…
- … if Halle Berry’s broadcast TV show can drive streaming viewership…
- …the latest Disney superhero film, Thunderbolts*, and whether their losing streak on streaming continues…
- …share a whole ton of TV show misses…
- …and a whole lot more.
But we start with a successful returning show for Netflix and a spin-off for Amazon. 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, 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 18th to August 31st.)
Television – Two Returning-Ish Shows…
August felt a pinch light in terms of major new releases from the streamers, with a few notable exceptions (Wednesday and Alien: Earth, primarily). Looking ahead, a few of the streamers seemed to have saved their big returning shows for September, not August.
Light, though, doesn’t mean “nothing” and all the streamers kept putting out new or returning shows. Two particular shows felt notable this week, one an attempt at a new franchise and the other a sophomore season of a successful-for-YA franchise.
Let’s start with Amazon because, frankly, it’s always fun to pick on a Big Tech company with a market capitalization of $2 trillion.
Can Amazon successfully launch a spinoff TV show of a successful franchise? So far, the data isn’t great. Citadel tried to launch several spinoffs over the past couple of years, and none of them worked. Prime Video also had a spinoff of the very popular superhero TV series The Boys—Gen V—and it had mediocre ratings. (A new season of that show comes in September, and already its ratings look soft.) Amazon also had a rumored Jack Ryan spinoff, but we haven’t seen much from the Tom Clancy Cinematic Universe lately.
Their latest try is The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, a spinoff of the popular The Terminal List. This spinoff and another season of the original were both ordered in February of 2022 and—checks calendar—it’s 2025 and this prequel (starring Taylor Kitsch) made it out first. This latest-Prime-Video-attempt-to-build-a-TV-franchise falls firmly in the “mixed results” list. On Nielsen, it only opened to 7.3 million hours, but it’s being released in the “three episodes then weekly” format, so that viewership is good but not great.
On Luminate, the new show peaked at 11.2 million hours, which, again, is good, but not great, and on Samba TV, it had 1.1 million viewers in the first six days, good for two weeks at 7th and 4th place. Add it all up and—as I say for most weekly shows—this show’s success depends on how long it lasts on the charts. If it keeps making it week after week, then Prime Video will have avoid having an expensive miss on their hands, but it will need a lot bigger numbers to be a “hit” in subsequent weeks. Looking at its IMDb score, it has good reviews—a 7.8—but only on 8.3K reviews, which doesn’t crack my unofficial “10K” barrier for successful shows.
As for Netflix, their show My Life with the Walter Boys had what I’d call a “solid” first season, especially for a YA show. The second season, coming out about two years after the first, opened to 16.5 million hours, which is above season one’s opening, though the first season had a bit of a slow burn to it.
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