Americans spend a lot of time watching Netflix — we’ve all heard the stories of how much bandwidth it eats up — and one analyst has crunched the numbers with some surprising results. If Netflix were a network, it would rank 15th in total minutes watched, explains Richard Greenfield with BTIG.
“Netflix streaming usage is exploding and is far, far bigger than traditional media executives give it credit for,” he said. “[It] had more hours of viewing in October than FX, HGTV and History and had more than 2x the viewer hours of CNN, Discovery, MSNBC and BET.” And if you isolate the numbers to just Netflix subscribers’ homes, it would rank #2 behind CBS in total minutes, he says.
All that said, in the full scheme of things, Netflix viewing is still a small percentage of the total: 2.4%. “While Netflix may be very popular in Netflix homes, it is rather meaningless when put into the context of total television viewing,” Greenfield says. “If you assume Netflix is eating into traditional TV viewing, its share could rise meaningfully.”
Now, Netflix didn’t release these numbers per se; they released an aggregate number for total minutes watched (2 billion) and Greenfield did the reverse math (with a few assumptions), landing at 64 minutes/day per subscriber. So there’s your big caveat. But if you were Netflix and the numbers really were this big, you may not want to release them.
For example, this week HBO stopped selling its DVDs to Netflix at a discount. And Warner Bros. is doubling the window for new movie releases to Netflix and others to 56 days. These are just a couple signs of the complicated relationship between content providers (who are often distributors themselves) and streaming distributors like Netflix. It will be an interesting year.