US streaming racks up ‘historic’ week
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Editor
| 07 October 2022
For what it says is the first time ever, research and measurement firm Nielsen has revealed that in the week from 5 - 11 September 2022 four different streaming platforms exceeded the 1 billion-minute threshold in the same week.
House of DRago 30Aug2022
Nielsen’s latest weekly Streaming Top 10 lists says that nothing illustrates the next phase of the streaming wars more concretely than the results posted , with more platform diversity than ever before. The data it says casts doubt on the theory that consumers are cutting back and prioritising fewer streaming options. Indeed, Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and HBO Max all enjoyed legitimate hits in the week.

Leading the pack was the launch of the fifth season of Cobra Kai on Netflix, drawing 1.7 billion viewing minutes across its 50 episodes. The Sony Pictures Television mega-hit has gone from YouTube Red, to YouTube Premium, and finally to Netflix. While the characters may have aged since its introduction, the audience remains 20% 18-34 year-olds and 35% 35-49 year-olds.

For Disney+, the highlight was the latest Marvel-verse movie instalment, Thor: Love and Thunder. In just a few days, it became the top film of the week garnering1.5 billoni viewing minutes from a crowd that skewed male (56%), with a third of viewing coming from the 35-49 year-old bracket.

Devil in Ohio, Netflix’s second title to exceed the billion-minute mark, jumped 92% over its opening weekend with 1.4 billion viewing minutes. The limited-thriller-series saw an audience that was two-thirds female and broadly distributed across viewers aged 18-64.

Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon on HBO Max (pictured) were described by the study as excellent examples of how streaming is making “appointment viewing” matter outside of the traditional linear setting.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power released a third episode in the interval and in total captured 1.2 billion viewing minutes and #4 place overall. Viewing was distributed fairly evenly across the three episodes, with 41% going to Episode 3. The audience was most concentrated in the 35-49 year-old group (32%), followed closely by 50-64 year-olds at 27%. House of the Dragon with just over 1 billion minutes.

In assessing the latter, Nielsen stressed that it was important to note that weekly episodes of HOTD were also watched on HBO’s linear cable network, but linear viewing was not reflected in these streaming numbers. Had it included linear viewing, Nielsen said it would have bumped the total by approximately 30%. Additionally, because of the differences in HBO’s release schedule vs. Nielsen’s Monday-Sunday measurement period, Episode 3 (which was released the previous Sunday) accounted for 53% of HOTD viewing in the week monitored.


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