(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.)
I don’t want to start right off by dunking on a major streamer/PR team…but just look at this tweet:
Over the course of a year, 90 million hours equals 1.7 million hours per week, not even enough to make the Nielsen charts. I mean, I don’t even want to imagine what dividing those 90 million hours by Disney+’s nearly 60 million US subscribers would equal…fine, it’s about 1.3 hours per subscriber per year, or a minute or two per subscriber per week!
Sigh.
Anyways, sports are now a very important and popular part of streaming (though not on Disney+ just yet, apparently). Sports boomed on streaming over the holidays, and that feels like a genuine change from years past. Netflix, in particular, has powered this movement.
And we saw that in the last two weeks of the year, enough so that sports viewership merited its own Streaming Ratings Report breakout issue, covering…
- Netflix’s Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua on 19-Dec
- Netflix’s two Christmas Day NFL games
- Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football game fall on Christmas Day, too
- Peacock’s exclusive streaming-only football game on 27-Dec
- Disney+’s alternate cast of Monday Night Football on 8-Dec
That’s our topic today, looking at how all these streaming sports shows performed. Next issue, I’ll cover the rest of the shows and films that came to streaming on 22-Dec and 29-Dec. Then we’ll return to 2026 Streaming Ratings Reports (getting back to single week issues), and start tabulating my annual “Winners and Losers of 2025” streaming analysis, the most in-depth dives into what actually worked and what didn’t in streaming.
But we start with Netflix’s latest boxing match to see if Jake Paul can match his previous viewership highs for Netflix.
Special/Sports – The Fight of the Four First Names
As a reminder, when it comes to Netflix’s global sports data, it’s always messy; they love to use different metrics to measure US viewership:
- For the Tyson-Paul fight, Netflix used TVision to provide US viewership.
- For the Serrano-Knox and Canelo-Crawford fights, they used VideoAmp.
- For NFL Christmas Day games, they use Nielsen.
- And for this fight…they didn’t provide any US data!
So while this is a US-focused report, I will use global reports today, specifically Whats-On-Netflix’s charts. First, here are the total hours by big event:
As a reminder, Kasey Moore didn’t include either the Netflix Slam or Netflix Cup…because they didn’t make the weekly charts. (The global engagement reports later revealed those events had minimal viewership, despite contemporaneous headlines arguing the opposite. The Netflix Cup had just 1.7 million hours globally, and The Netflix Slam had 2.6 million.)
My first initial reaction is that, looking at the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson numbers compared to Jake Paul’s second bout: Mike Tyson is still very, very, very popular. You could probably toss another “very” in there. Looking at those gaudy initial numbers, it’s safe to say the “Taylor Swift Effect” was at work here, in that Tyson is still the most popular name in boxing.
To repeat: Jake Paul’s latest bout only had 16-to-24% the same viewership as his fight with Mike Tyson. That clearly implies Mike Tyson drew the vast majority of that audience!
Again, as for the American data, again, I can’t give it to you. Kasey Moore pulled the data in table form, and you can see the glaring missing spot for the Jake Paul vs Anthony Joshua fight:
That said, in this case, I think the global data is directionally accurate for the US data, as you can see in the other fight. Netflix has also said US viewing is “about” 55% of the total for boxing. I went to Google Trends, and I think it shows the decline in interest for this fight:
The NFL Remains the King of All TV…But Streaming Viewership Was Slightly Underwhelming
As a reminder, I try to provide one thing more than any other in my writing/analysis:
Moderation and nuanced takes
So we need to keep a few things in mind regarding streaming viewership of the latest NFL games:
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