Streaming services are very reticent to release official viewership data, for the sole reason that they don’t have to. The various platforms are under no obligation to share how many subscribers have watched the latest film and television exclusives, so they largely keep the data to themselves.
Third-party aggregators like Samba TV and the Nielsen ratings offer some level of insight, but HBO Max and Amazon have never unveiled concrete statistics for anything. Even Netflix, always regarded as the most transparent of the ‘Big Five’, release four-week figures based on a household watching for at least two minutes of content.
However, at the Vox Media Code Conference via Deadline, Netflix’s co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos unveiled the most in-depth breakdown of the company’s biggest hits we’ve ever seen, based on both the standard two-minute metric and total hours viewed within a 28-day window, which you can check out below.
The updated analysis from an hourly perspective greatly changes the last set of all-time rankings released by the company, with Bird Box displacing Extraction as the number one movie, although Bridgerton remains Netflix‘s most-watched TV show whatever way you try and slice it.
Admittedly, there aren’t any surprising titles among the bunch, although it’s fascinating to look at the discrepancies between how many households watched something compared to the hours spent streaming, with a higher position on the latter indicating that more subscribers watched the project from start to finish.
