NBC used its presentation at the Television Critics Association's press tour in Pasadena, Calif. on Wednesday to drop a streaming bomb — it thinks it knows the TV series ratings for popular titles available on Netflix and Amazon.
There is no denying that TV networks are probably worried about the impact Internet-based streaming services have on their own ratings. Platforms like Netflix and Hulu release entire seasons at a time so that viewers can watch at their own speed, opposed to the traditional one-episode per week format networks use, as they hope viewers will keep coming back each week.
With the rising popularity of streaming services and the amount of critically-acclaimed original series airing on these platforms, of course NBC would want to know how these series stack up against their own ratings.
Series on TV networks like NBC are rated by Nielsen, whereas streaming platforms like Netflix have not released their rating information.
However, now, NBC thinks it has finally figured out just how many people are tuning in.
NBC president of research and media development Alan Wurzel presented Netflix's ratings, which were estimated by the San Francisco tech firm Symphony (which uses audio content recognition technology and software that is loaded on users' phones to measure TV viewing through capturing the soundtrack of the titles they watch) using a sample size of 15,000.
According to the data, the Netflix original series Marvel's Jessica Jones averaged 4.8 million viewers ages 18 to 45 during a 35-day viewing cycle from September through December. Masters of None had an average of 3.9 million viewers and Narcos had 3.2 million viewers during this same period. However, it's important to note that the data did not include the first few days of the series' release.
While you may expect these numbers to be higher, the three Netflix original series are not the platform's most popular. Instead, that would be Orange is the New Black. Season 4 of OitNB won't be released until the summer, but the Symphony data found that season 3 was still averaging 644,000 viewers two months after its June release and that users spent 23 to 25 percent of their TV watching time streaming the series.
Wurzel also revealed that Amazon's recently-released original series The Man in the High Castle had only 2.1 million viewers. The platform said that this series launch was its most popular to date.
In comparison, NBC's TV ratings are significantly higher. Shows like The Voice and Blindspot each have an average of over nine million viewers.
The data helps put the impact of streaming on-demand platforms into perspective, but the Netflix numbers are still impressive when you keep in mind this is just a sample size.
Source: Variety
