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What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ortusdux 3y ago93,455,200,000 total hours viewed from January to June 2023. Some quick math says that at any give time, 1 out of every 400 people is actively watching Netflix.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoThose stats only list shows that had over 50000 views, so depending on how long the tail is it could be much more
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- teej 3y ago> In total, this report covers more than 18,000 titles — representing 99% of all viewing on Netflix — and nearly 100 billion hours viewed.
- vermilingua 3y agoThe quick math doesn't capture that not every hour viewed is an actively viewed hour.
- nhinck 3y ago~20 million hours per hour... crazy amount of output. Also if you assume that people only watch while awake then it's 1 in ~250 awake people.
- ShamelessC 3y ago[flagged]
- zigman1 3y agoWhat exactly is the value of this comment?
- k__ 3y agoMaybe they netflixed and chilled.
- doublerabbit 3y agoYou ask the question, however by replying you attain the same value as of the comment above you.
- ghoomketu 3y agoI guess the comment was more tongue in cheek wrt to Netflix and chill meme but tbh I have my tv running all day (though not just Netflix) just as background noise so ranking shows by number of hours watched may have lots of noise added to it.
- ShamelessC 3y agoIt’s a critique of the name of their newly released statistics, which apparently assumes “what we watched” is equivalent to “what people watched on Netflix”, which may have been the state of things 5 years ago but isn’t the state of things at all anymore.
- jameshart 3y agoThey popped up a dialog prompt to ask you if you were still watching.
- nrdgrrrl 3y ago[dead]
- drexlspivey 3y agoI've literally never heard of any of these shows and I watch a lot of TV shows. I only know of Vikings in the top 50
- ferrumfist 3y ago"Beef" was pretty great, I'd recommend that. I'm surprised to see no mention of "The Witcher", though, I figured that would've ranked relatively highly despite the many creative shortcomings of the show.
- kranke155 3y agoWitcher S1 is at row 171 Witcher S2 at row 233 Witcher S3 at row 556
- jay_kyburz 3y agoI really love the production values, the costumes, the makeup, the world. I love the idea of the Witcher. But I have no idea what the story is about or what anybody is talking about. It's just all way too complicated.
- kranke155 3y agoThe TV show made it hard to follow. The games are fairly easy to get I’d say.
- jncfhnb 3y agoI thought season 1 was straightforward once you understood the dual timelines
- spiderice 3y ago> once you understood the dual timelines That's a big caveat. Haha. I made it through almost the entirety of the season before I realized there were dual timelines. Nothing made sense. Maybe that's on me.. but I feel like enough people had similar issues that it's more likely a major shortcoming of the show.
- shadowtree 3y agoMy god is this power law driven, just put that into a graph! Top show has twice the view count of show number 8. Would love to map that against budgets and sub numbers - without ads the viewcounts matter zilch.
- kranke155 3y agoSub numbers? How would you exactly relate sub numbers vs shows? Try and graph how many people only watched 1 show, or watched that show right after joining?
- shadowtree 3y agoBasically answer two questions: 1 - How much minimal time does a consumer watch Netflix to re-subscribe? 2 - How much content spend is necessary to achieve that minimal viewing time? Everything else is waste and lost margin.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoThat threshold is likely shifting as Netflix has less and less compelling content, and the competition markets their exclusives more. Though maybe there is some core who just doesn't bother cancelling and resubscribing because it's become a hassle.
- sigmar 3y agoKeep in mind 'view hours' != 'view count'. A show that is twice as many hours will have twice the views hours with the same view count. people also rewatch certain stuff, so popularity might be inflated. and I assume longer shows correlate to higher budget (because the production expects more viewership).
- jval43 3y agoWith all their employees and machine learning people Netflix couldn't find a single data scientist to present this in a nicer way? All we get is an Excel sheet dump with a huge list, not even grouped by series? Not to mention regions, languages, genres, some graphs, etc. I'm a bit surprised to be honest.
- kranke155 3y agoI wonder if this data dump is a consequence of the recent SAG and WGA agreements. A large part of their fight was about Netflix opening up the numbers. I was under the impression that it was to be done privately, but maybe they have to release this publicly and a lot more data privately to the Guilds.
- adamiscool8 3y agoFunny, I was going to comment how refreshing it is to see a raw Excel data dump instead of insights tortured to whatever agenda by a data science team. Regions and genres would be nice though.
- tgv 3y agoHave you never seen netflix' recommendations? That must tell you how much they care about customer facing data.
- teej 3y agoThis isn't a marketing effort, it's a press release for Hollywood insiders.
- jay_kyburz 3y agoReally, I came to say I really appreciated having just the data to play with. Would have been nice to have a few more columns though. Country of origin, number of episodes and play time. etc.
- zerocrates 3y agoThe only thing I'd really like to see them add is just a column for how many hours each thing is, so you could tell how many "watches" this vaguely converts to. Of course you could look that up but, a lot of looking up to do there.
- Barrin92 3y agoVery interesting but not unexpected to see Korean shows doing very well, seems in line with film and music. The country's really becoming a pop culture powerhouse.
- firebirdn99 3y agoKinda sad that Netflix opted for quantity over quality. It shows with all the inane sequels like Murder mystery 2, Extraction 2 and with the idea of just filling an uninteresting script with some stars to make the numbers like Red Notice. And many of the top 50 shows reflect just that. The last Netflix original I watched and liked was The Queen's Gambit.
- nomel 3y agoOr, to look at it another way, they're giving their paying customers what they want.
- stubish 3y agoOr, to look at it another way, they are giving the profitable customers what they want. It is clear Netflix don't want me as a paying customer, and that makes sense. At least in the short term.
- nomel 3y agoThat's not another way, that's the same way. ;) Although, technically, the most profitable customer is the one that has low view time, but still subscribes. The most stable customer is probably one with high view time, but they're also probably the least profitable, unless they're naturally helping promote the service.
- danielscrubs 3y agoThey are not. They removed the five star rating because they thought people lied to themselves, but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data. What they will give you is what I call the lowest common denominator of shows.
- hobofan 3y ago> but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data If you mean from a "critique" standpoint then no. If you meant from a "data wrangling standpoint then yes, as binary like/dislike data is just a lot easier to work with for recommendation algorithms. There are many good reasons to move from a five star rating system to a binary rating system, and yeah, I think many of those fall into the "people lied to themselves" category: - People tend to note use five or ten star systems on a continuous scale with certain points on the scale being biased - People tend to go into "movie critic"-mode when they see a 5/10-star scale, as those are usually used on sites like IMDB. That drives them to try and rate the movie "objectively" and in accordance with an intellectual image they want to portray, rather than what they actually like/dislike consuming and spend their time watching - Netflix also displayed the ratings as 5-star "adjusted ratings for the viewer", which already took your preferences into account. Not a single person I've talked to back then was aware of that, so everyone tried to do the same mental gymnastics they do when trying to project global IMDB ratings to their personal preferences. Moving to a "XX% match for you" together with the like/dislikes is something that people understand a lot better All-in-all, I don't think the rating system really has been an issue in the recent years. The catalog has been a much bigger issue during that time. I'm pretty sure that Netflix's rating and recommendation system has been good enough that it has served me everything that I'd like to watch on their platform and now I'm out of content.
- teej 3y agoI noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25: TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,800,000 CoComelon 601,200,000 Suits (2011) 599,100,000 The Blacklist 596,900,000 Manifest 581,900,000 Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000 Wednesday 507,700,000 Gilmore Girls 505,800,000 Breaking Bad 505,000,000 Queen Charlotte 503,000,000 Friends (1994) 448,500,000 Love Is Blind 439,300,000 Lucifer 434,300,000 The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000 PAW Patrol 392,300,000 New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000 Firefly Lane 342,700,000
- goenning 3y agoFriends (1994) is still going strong
- robluxus 3y agoBoth Friends and TBBT are popular with (American) English learners.
- firecall 3y agoProbably a bounce due to the sad passing of Matthew Perry. :-(
- BryanLegend 3y agoThese numbers were for Jan-Jun of this year.
- firecall 3y ago
- thih9 3y agoI wish this kind of transparency was present in the regular ui - instead of the usual “we think you may like” suggestions. I wanted to check out a couple of titles when browsing this list.
- impulser_ 3y agoSurprised to see The Glory in the top 3 since it's a Korean show, but it's definitely one of the best Netflix shows. Seems like the Korean entertainment industry is big for Netflix, seems like it might be second to Hollywood.
- pcurve 3y agoMe too. Though I personally enjoyed My Liberation Note more.
- wmab 3y agoIncredible that old shows have gone on to enormous success after streaming on Netflix - Suits, Breaking Bad, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I wonder how much these streaming hours compare to the original network viewerships. It would also be interesting to understand the licensing deals that go onto extending these shows onto Netflix, seems like a no-brainer for any older show to get a second life, especially after seeing Suits and others doing 600M hours.
- dylan604 3y agoUs Boomers call that Syndication. It would be interesting to see the contracts written for these shows. The old broadcast days, shows tried to get to 100 episodes as quickly as possible as that was the qualifier for becoming syndicated. Becoming syndicated is where people really started earning with those points on the back end.
- aidenn0 3y agoI have a Netflix subscription. I have watched exactly 0 hours total of the items called out in TFA; am I out of touch? Am I missing something of particular cultural value?
- recursive 3y agoTake it from me, an out of touch old guy. It doesn't matter.
- manquer 3y agoWhy would that be the logical conclusion ? Not everyone listens to pop music for example that doesn't mean we are out of touch, not seeing pop shows just means we have different tastes than the most common denominator. There are a large variety of tastes and streaming companies cater to the segments which make enough financial returns, not just only pop culture, as long as enough people are there in the segments we like - it shouldn't matter what pop culture is doing.
- yuppie_scum 3y agoNo, it’s the children who are wrong.
- chihuahua 3y agoYou may want to give "Breaking Bad" a try - watch the first season to see if you enjoy it. I'm not sure if it qualifies as "cultural value" but many critics like it. I liked it too, even though I hate almost everything. It has some good acting and writing, and a compelling storyline.
- deafpolygon 3y agoNo wonder Netflix continues to make shitty shows. People are watching shitty shows. I don't watch the shows that the bulk of Netflix viewers watch!
- echelon 3y agoSame. I feel Netflix is a really shitty version of HBO. I rarely, if ever, watch it. The original House of Cards was great. Mindhunter was alright. Neither reached the pinnacle of most HBO programming. It's a shame that David Zaslav believes prestige television must take a backseat to cheap, "comfort" viewing. And the fact that they ditched such a prestigious brand to rename themselves "Max".
- lozf 3y ago"The original 'House of Cards'" was this one[0] set in the UK. Presumably you're thinking of the US remake with Kevin Spacey. [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098825/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098825/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 /pedant
- lotsofpulp 3y ago> It's a shame that David Zaslav believes prestige television must take a backseat to cheap, "comfort" viewing. While Zaslav will obviously make things worse, note that it was AT&T that fired all the HBO bosses that curated HBO’s offerings quite a few years ago now. HBO was killed before Zaslav got to it.
- deadbunny 3y agoSo exactly the same as all entertainment throughout history?
- Popeyes 3y agoCrazy to see The Witcher Season 2 (renewed), Sandman (renewed) and 1899 (cancelled) so closely grouped.
- Cyph0n 3y agoThe cancellation of 1899 was the last straw for me.
- eps 3y agoGive "Dark" a watch.
- nomel 3y agoI was fairly disappointed in 1899, after coming from Dark (same creators). Dark was incredibly dense, by comparison. Dark is easily my top show on Netflix, so far.
- ghshephard 3y agoConcur regarding Dark - it's kind of amazing that Netflix can, when it wishes to, produce "HBO Caliber" content - but so much of the time it's just time-filler drek. I don't regret a single minute of the time I spent watching Dark 3-4 years ago, nor the time I spent in the office discussing it, or even the time I tried to graph it all (with varying degrees of success)...
- pier25 3y ago> it's kind of amazing that Netflix can, when it wishes to, produce "HBO Caliber" content Netflix greenlights the projects and provides the money but it doesn't really produce the shows.
- ydant 3y agoExactly what I downloaded the report to look for - For Jan-Jun 2023, it was 278th most viewed on the platform with 51,800,000 hours of view. It was released in 2022-11-17. It just makes me wonder what sort of views it would have had to get to get continued for another season. Definitely a shame - it was a fun show.
- imglorp 3y agoThese results must be heavily influenced by canceled series but the word is not mentioned (probably verbotten) on the posting. If I've watched a dozen series and had them cancelled before their conclusion over recent years -- not an exaggeration -- I will be much less likely to watch a new series. Instead I will tend towards movies or a limited duration series, usually sixish episodes with a premeditated conclusion, posted and safe. In other words, their cancel lust drives the viewing, maybe more than the material itself, and it's not being accounted for here.
- chihuahua 3y agoImagine if Google had a studio for TV shows; they would cancel everything after 1 or 2 episodes.
- arebop 3y agoNah they gave the shows like 2 months, and the studio lingered more than a year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi...]
- magicalhippo 3y agoThos has been a thing for a long time. Like you I'm not watching a show until I know it's a contained thing or at least 2-3 seasons are out.
- netsharc 3y agoI wondered if The Night Agent was a show from years ago they're licensing from the BBC, but I'm confusing it with The Night Manager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ZcaKdvML8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ZcaKdvML8
- Arrath 3y agoFWIW, the Night Manager is leagues better than the Night Agent.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoDon't worry, we can still blame discovery/promotion for lackluster viewing numbers when kvetching about what they chose to cancel.
- jflitt 3y agoPretty cool to interact with this data using ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-pOGRX2Bx6-what-we-watched-a-nflx-engagement-report https://chat.openai.com/g/g-pOGRX2Bx6-what-we-watched-a-nflx...
- vinni2 3y agointeresting that this custom gpt works in the ios chatgpt app while some others don’t. Is it because it doesn’t have any custom actions? Btw it gave me wrong answer to most watched tv show in 2023.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- plasma 3y agoNeat, I noticed it gave me wrong data though, and when I asked for the top 3 rows it provided the wrong value, due to not using UTF8 - Asking ChatGPT to use utf8 support fixed it, perhaps update it's prompt. Check out https://chat.openai.com/share/34091576-036a-4e82-b4e3-a8798d86f9ae https://chat.openai.com/share/34091576-036a-4e82-b4e3-a8798d...
- jgurewitz 3y agoThis is a wonderful gold mine for data geeks. The real question to me is why Netflix is releasing this. It's a massive boon for their competitors. My instinct is they either were hacked/people were able to game the recommendations enough to get at it that they decided to just share it. Unexpected.
- spacebanana7 3y agoI suspect it’s deliberate business strategy. Netflix wants to licence more content and sees value in demonstrating to the stock market that it has the best economics to do so. If Netflix can get ten million viewers for a tier 2 general entertainment series, the IP holders should pick Netflix as a partner over a Paramount+ type service that can only get a few hundred thousand viewers. It’s no coincidence this announcement is coming at a time when everyone is trying to reduce first party content spend.
- ironick09 3y agoJust goes to show how much people make things up and couldn’t be further from the truth (see other comments for why this information was released, this one is flat out wrong).
- lmm 3y agoI see no contradiction. They're obliged to release this information but it may also suit their commercial interests.
- manquer 3y agoThere was a major transparency ask from both writers and other creative community members as part of demands during the recent SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, perhaps publishing the data was part of the settlement in those disputes.
- thebradbain 3y agoIt was! Previously studios did not want to disclose streaming numbers publicly, except under NDA to certain authorized union members. Now writers (and actors, and anyone else) can use this information to better negotiate their worth with studios, rather than it being 1-sided. https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won > Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to provide the Guild the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series). Aggregated information can be shared.
- dang 3y agoRelated articles (via threads that we've merged hither): https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-releases-viewing-data-for-18000-tv-shows-movies-1235745500/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-release... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-12/netflix-releases-viewer-data-on-every-show-film-for-first-time https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-12/netflix-r... https://www.ft.com/content/87f3dcec-ec8b-4c6c-9555-8d350e9625d8 https://www.ft.com/content/87f3dcec-ec8b-4c6c-9555-8d350e962...
- dom96 3y agoThis is just about the worst "yearly report" by a major company I've seen. A mass of text, a link to an xlsx file and a youtube video with audio quality remniscent of a telephone earnings call. Where are the pretty charts and interactivity all in glorious HTML5?
- Tomis02 3y agoSlightly related. Netflix is that company that doesn't provide English subtitles in Australia (unless the movie/show's original language is not English), and possibly other native English countries as well. They do provide closed captions however, so that we get helpful captions such as "loud urinating sounds".
- barryvan 3y agoIs that really so problematic, though? It's the same as ABC iView and SBS OnDemand, from what I can tell... Perhaps this is just to comply with local law, then?
- Tomis02 3y agoIt is very problematic because modern actors mumble to the point you can't understand much unless the volume is high enough for your entire neighbourhood to hear. Having closed captions instead of subtitles harms immersion. Netflix can provide both English subtitles and closed captions (as seen in some Korean shows). They simply choose not to offer them for most English-language titles.
- wredue 3y agoLots of subtitles are straight up wrong anyway. You’re nearly as good off guessing what they said in some cases. I honestly thing that they’re created by third parties who just run the audio through an AI and call it a day.
- shoelessone 3y agoPossibly unrelated but similar idea at least: in Japan a lot of the Japanese TV shows I watch don't have English subtitles available, but in the US the same shows on Netflix do have English subtitles. I don't fully understand the reasoning for this on Netflix's side.
- charcircuit 3y agoThey may not have the license for English subtitles in Japan similar to how outside of Japan you can't get Japanese subtitles on Japanese TV shows because of licensing.
- EduardLev 3y agoMakes me sad that the best show on/produced by Netflix (Narcos: Mexico) has so little hours watched compared to the rest (30,000).
- pier25 3y agoThis was only from January to June in 2023. The S3 of Narcos Mexico was released in 2021 and it wasn't very good compared to the S1 and S2.
- andrei_says_ 3y agoThe best discovery for me this year was Blue Eye Samurai. A masterpiece of action, beauty, timing, and more than passable writing.
- tantalor 3y agoKind of funny that Netflix, the video hosting website, uses YouTube to host their videos on their website.
- kumarvvr 3y agoYoutube is for marketing. Netflix is for revenue. Just like regular ads by TV channels on youtube.
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoWhy is this funny? Netflix is not a video hosting website? It's a subscription-based on-demand streaming service. You can't host my videos on Netflix, can you?
- anvuong 3y agoWhy is that funny? If you treat Youtube as a social network, which it pretty much is, then it would actually be funny if Netflix is not on it.
- bmacho 3y agoBecause youtube comes with things like * depending on another, rival company * mysterious bugs you have no control over * loss of your own data * giving your customers data to a company for free that maybe even would have paid for the same data * not your users having a conversation about your product on a media that you don't control (which is not necessarily bad, but is definitely a side effect) * it is illegal to embed youtube in Europe, without asking consent first, and immoral in the rest of the world too* and such. 'Funny' as in 'ridiculously bad decision'. If I were at Netflix I'd just put the videos on a netflix server in a standard media format, embedded with html video tag. Simple way to ensure that as long as the website is up the video is also up, users are not redirected from your website, the video is fast, good quality, and so on. *Not the act, but how they do it currently. When you open the article, it tells google that you have opened the article for no reason. They should avoid this if they can (and they can), also they should put google in their privacy statement which they didn't do.
- pryelluw 3y agoI wonder what the numbers were for when the office was on Netflix.
- pcurve 3y agoI love that they released the report in Excel format. They collectively saved millions of man hours across the world from doing useless data scraping and reformatting.
- jncfhnb 3y agoI think you’re off by several orders of magnitude there
- wtallis 3y agoI think it's the same kind of math the studios use to estimate the damages from piracy: ignoring that people will simply give up when not presented with a reasonable alternative. How much money would a movie bring in if everyone who cared enough to watch it illegally for free had instead chosen to see it in theaters or buy the blu-ray? How many man-hours would be spent crunching this data if Netflix hadn't dumped it in a convenient format but everyone interested in the data was willing to process it the hard way?
- thebradbain 3y agoFor anyone else wondering “why they’ve decided to do this”— This is an outcome of the WGA strike negotiations. Now writers (and actors, and anyone else) can use this information to better negotiate their worth with studios, rather than it being 1-sided. All other streaming services should be following suit soon. https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won > Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to provide the Guild the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series). Aggregated information can be shared.
- spiderice 3y agoIs this list only self-produced programs then? The Netflix announcement makes it sound like it included everything on Netflix.
- thebradbain 3y agoI imagine they’re just releasing everything at this point so they can show the total number of hours watched to investors, who I would guess will also be very interested in the numbers as a benchmark for valuing streaming services going forward. Suits (2011) for example is not a Netflix original, yet it made it into their top 10 by hours viewed.
- antasvara 3y agoI've looked at the list and there are plenty of shows that aren't Netflix originals. Not sure how they chose the shows in the list, though.
- rezonant 3y agoOthers mention that this is a result of the WGA strike, though apparently the terms of the deal allowed the streaming company's to require an NDA to view the information, so that doesn't explain everything.
- rezonant 3y ago
- jncfhnb 3y agoHuh, wow, good for Alice in borderlands. Didn’t expect it to do so well. Death games are kind of cliche by this point but I liked this show. The games were fun and not as depraved. They were often dumb and unbalanced. And the final fight was wildly choreographed much better than almost any non martial arts thing
- danielscrubs 3y agoI think we have a US exhaustion. There are some really great movies that does great locally, then gets a remake by Hollywood and flops because it gets americanized, and then you kill not only the american version but the local one as well, as it becomes harder to market it, killed by association. American movies are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s too much.
- jncfhnb 3y agoI don’t feel like I can name an example of a good foreign film that got poorly remade such that the local one is bad Bad American remakes seem kind of rare too, with the exception of terrible live action adaptions
- nmz 3y agoWhat you said did not make much sense, if it got poorly remade how can the local one be bad? that would mean the local one is better because the remake is worse. Most horror remakes are seen as bad and a lot are forgotten, The mist, The Shining, Psycho. Shows imported from britain are bad, like The it crowd, a good deal of panel shows from britain crashed and burned. Hollywood also has the capability of throwing away movies if they think are bad enough. "Release the snyder cut". There's plenty of bad remakes, I'm not young but a lot of things are remakes from the 50s 60s 70s 80s and we just don't know, apart from the adaptations of foreign movies and films.
- jncfhnb 3y agoWell that was the premise I doubted so…
- ziptron 3y agoI wonder what else humanity would have done with those 100 billion hours if it were not for Netflix.
- DougEiffel 3y agoIn the old days? Back-breaking work that's no longer necessary or efficient. In the slightly less old days, probably socialize. Nothing super productive or world changing I assume. I would also guess that a lot of these hours are spent sleeping rather than actively watching. Most people I know put comfort shows on to help them fall asleep these days.
- joering2 3y agoIts interesting to think if only people not waste their time, how productive they would be. Then you realize how hard it is to get successful in life in terms of work, how every single idea and product / service has so many competitors, and you become glad that so many people don't do anything but waste their time :)
- munificent 3y agoI think socializing is world changing. So many of the global systemic problems we face are either caused by or exacerbated by a lack of social cohesion.
- AngryData 3y agoI don't know that I can agree with the common view that back in the "old days" life was just tons of back breaking work. Yeah it was definitely more labor heavy, but people didn't have the nutrition to keep up with the heavy workload people assume these days and not be crippled by 40, which we know they weren't outside of accidents. Plus it would make all the art, monuments, religious ceremony, technological and social advancements, war, and other time and energy consuming activities near impossible if people just barely managed to survive. And there are tons of games from antiquity that people wouldn't invent and been playing if they were working all the time. Especially when you consider it would have been even harder during bronze age or stone age eras with even less technology and knowledge. And farming work just doesn't keep bringing gains by working all through the year. Crops take time to grow and can only be harvested at certain times. You are wasting effort keeping planting past the spring because you will get worse and worse returns on it and at some point you won't be able to harvest or eat it all before it rots anyways. People worked for themselves and did what they needed to survive and live how they wanted, and doing more beyond that gave worse and worse returns that eventually people will stop for not having much value. Chopping 5+ years of wood ahead of time gains nothing because without a ridiculously large building to store it in it, which also requires more maintenance, will rot and lose energy and become less valuable over time. There is no point in making a lifetime's worth of your own clothes now if it is just going to get eaten by moths and fungus after being stored for 10-20 years. You are only going to get slightly ahead to head off bad times and then stop producing after that. One of the biggest rallying points behind the 19th and 20th century labor movements was people wanting to return to the lower working hours that their grandparents and great grandparents worked living a far more subsistence lifestyle, and is how we came up with a 40 hour work week, which also assumed having time for the multitude of religious holidays and seasonal breaks in work they also enjoyed, and was still a mere compromise between the two lifestyles.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoSorry maybe I miss something, could somebody link the list of shows with hours watched?
- monospaced 3y agoYou can find it here: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4cd45et68cgf/1HyknFM84ISQpeua6TjM7A/97a0a393098937a8f29c9d29c48dbfa8/What_We_Watched_A_Netflix_Engagement_Report_2023Jan-Jun.xlsx https://assets.ctfassets.net/4cd45et68cgf/1HyknFM84ISQpeua6T...
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoThank you
- j7ake 3y agoRead the top 10 list, and I haven’t heard of any of these shows. Is the world segregating such that there are fewer shared activities in a community to talk about? Growing up 30 years ago, everybody knew the top 5 TV shows even if you didn’t watch them: they were the topic of conversations or at least listed in thr “TV guides”
- mikesabat 3y ago> Is the world segregating such that there are fewer shared activities in a community to talk about? Yes very much so. I'll notice it mostly on google news. For many things I search for, Google News starts to show me articles on that topic. If I look up an event, restaurant or movie the topic then becomes a regular topic in my Google News page. It makes the topic feel bigger than it is, and of course, crowds out other topics so that I'm not hearing about them.
- zhivota 3y agoThis is a good articulation of something I've noticed more and more recently with Google News. I used to feel like I was getting a broad overview of the news of the day by browsing it... Increasingly it feels like a filter bubble constructed just for me, which is unsettling and not that useful to me. I suppose it's time to seek out other sources of news aggregation.
- rasz 3y ago>everybody knew the top 5 TV shows even if you didn’t watch them as defined by Nielsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research#Ratings/share_and_total_viewers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research#Ratings... 1980 1,700 audiometer homes and a rotating board of nearly 850 diary respondents 1985 Nielsen meters TV viewing in more than 5,500 U.S. homes 2003 Nielsen doubles its national TV sample from 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. households 2014 Nielsen has installed electronic devices known as “people meters” in 16,916 homes 2017 A Nielsen rep personally told me, this very afternoon, that there are about 17,000 Nielsen 2019 approximately 46,000 households nationwide 2021 Nielsen ... among its almost 60,000 active 2022 National TV panel reached 42,000 households 2023 Nielsen uses several sampling procedures, but its main one is to track the viewing patterns of about 20,000 households Looks like in the nineties they had ~5K sample points.
- jaimex2 3y agoWho else cancelled their Netflix?
- yalogin 3y agoIt just occurred to me Netflix has a great history of finding ways to screw workers. They famously are the first company to go with “unlimited vacation” so as to not have any money on the books and also screw employees from taking a vacation. They also found ways to not share any revenue with writers and not reveal engagement numbers either
- jedberg 3y ago> They famously are the first company to go with “unlimited vacation” I took more vacation at Netflix than anywhere else I ever worked, and so did most of the people around me. Management would make it a point to remind you to take your vacation, and would always make sure they all took vacations more than a week at a time so you knew it was ok. Unlimited vacation was a huge benefit to me as a worker at Netflix. Other companies have ruined it by using it as a stick instead of a carrot. > They also found ways to not share any revenue with writers and not reveal engagement numbers either They paid up front, before the show was even created. For most writers this worked out better than residuals. It was only the writers on the most popular shows that got screwed by this, and only after Netflix got really popular. The system needed changing and it was good that they went on strike for it, but they all seem to forget that it was actually advantageous for them at the beginning.
- globular-toast 3y agoThe writers didn't get screwed, though. By paying upfront Netflix completely absorbed all the risk. The writers just decided they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI am proud for not being part of those stats. :)
- Aissen 3y agoThe report is lacking a column that shows the total hours watched divided by the number of hours in this content. Some top shows by hour watched are telenovelas with 60 (!) 43min+ episodes per season. It would also give a much better place to movies vs series.
- _8j50 3y agoFor me at least, streaming platforms are becoming more like where I sample content so I can download the content myself separately. I had several experiences where I would start content and all of a sudden I can't find it anymore because it left the platform or they're playing shenanigans (ML?) , like with onepiece it wouldn't show up at all under my profile so had to create a new one. Others requring using a different IP. The latest straw is ads. Nope, no way. I mean, I think streaming platforms are actually undercharging so I'd be happy to pay more but they just like ads. So, "downloading" content via other means so far has resulted in better quality videos (although subtitles have been a struggle). In one case, the older video was upscaled by ML by some random person and it was much better looking than what the streaming platform offered! Best things in life are free and all.
- dwayne_dibley 3y agoI know this is nothing new, but imagine what we could do with billions of hours worth of brain time if we all collectively decided not to watch TV (or even just stopped watching Big Bang)
- jamiek88 3y agoWe’d be reading trashy novels, listening to trashy radio shows, watching trashy plays, leaving silly comments on message boards etc. Human nature is human nature. You think Isaac Newton wouldn’t be working on the principia if big bang theory tv show existed back then? Would Stephen Hawking have actually unified field theory if Coronation Street didn’t exist? Shakespeares audience was the drunken masses.
- flerchin 3y agoI wonder how the numbers break out. Quick googling says netflix users have 3.2 hours of watch-time per day, on average. With at most, $10/m of their revenue going to content (probably far less), that works out to $0.104 per hour of watch time. So if Night Agent costs less than $100M to produce, it was worth.
- ElijahLynn 3y agoThe report is an .xlsx file. Would be nice if there was a web viewer.