What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report | Hacker News Reader

What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

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234 pointshelsinkiandrew339 comments

For 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

> 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.

Is this list only self-produced programs then? The Netflix announcement makes it sound like it included everything on Netflix.

I 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.

I'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.

Others 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.

It seems not, as from a bit of cursory research, Netflix did not produce Chiquititas (2013), Paw Patrol, Wrong Side of the Tracks, CoComelon, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Suits, Breaking Bad, etc.

For some of these they may have exclusive distribution rights, but I don't think any of those are Netflix Original content.

That's a great outcome. I was the producer of "The Edge of Democracy" - line 14047 of the Excel file with 200,000 hours viewed. Although we were nominated for an Oscar and became a Netflix originals, they've never disclosed any numbers related to how successful (or not) our film was on the platform.

Very interesting. Now that you know, how do you interpret those numbers ?

If it’s okay to ask, does Netflix only pay a fixed sum (they have to disclose numbers if there are view-based royalties, right)? Is that normal?

View-based streaming royalties (“residuals”) were also something won in the strikes. They previously didn’t exist for streaming in the same way they did for cable tv or theatrical releases— no matter how successful the show. That’s part of the reason streamers didn’t want to release numbers in the first place.

There were still a lot of other factors then and now when it came to payment—mainly due to the fact the minimums are floors, not maximums—so it isn’t exactly a “flat fee”, but there is a “minimum floor” payment schedule based on a formula of # episodes, genre, # weeks, studio budget, season #, etc. Now it includes # views, when previously it didn’t.

I wonder if royalty agreements will affect which content the distribution platforms choose to promote.

If Netflix pays the creators of show A $X per 1000 views, and of show B 2*$X per 1000 views, I can see them choosing to display A more prominently than B

Wow! Thanks for sharing the insights.

Amazing how much data Netflix would have, but sharing it externally would hinder negotiations.

So you can't even get total views?!

Who needs new content? Kinda sad to see the most popular shows being Friends, Suits, Breaking Bad, the walking dead etc.

(1) I remember the times when Breaking Bad was new content.

(2) Once somebody asked Quentin Taranto in an interview: "So, you haven't managed to produce anything better than Pulp Fiction by now, how come?" Tarantion answered: "You mean, somebody has managed to?" Some things just end up being exceptionally good, and you can't produce another comparable specimen on demand.

I wonder if that Tarantino response is apocryphal. I have heard the same interaction credited to Joseph Heller about Catch-22:

At appearances to publicise his later books, readers would often bluntly tell him that he hadn’t written anything as good as Catch-22, to which the reply, after a growly laugh, was: “No. But nor has anyone else.” - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/20/george-clooney...

Or perhaps when you create something exceptionally good you end up coming up with this response to the no doubt often repeated question of why you haven't been able to top it, or reading about someone else with the same problem and thinking "hey, that's good - think I'll use it"

They asked him why he hadn’t been able to come up with a better joke to address that question. He replied with a laugh “no, but nor has anyone else”.

Eventually enough content will have been produced that a human could watch an incredible series every day of their lives without anything new coming out. That's when humanity will peak and crumble happily away.

This has happened with books already and nothing (arguably) broke.

I discovered Breaking Bad exists this year. So, likely, whole bunch of people discovered it along with me.

Nothing sad about it, it is really good show.

Seems like a sign that the medium is finally maturing to me. Imagine if people only ever read new books.

That's just how it goes, though. I'm sure if we had music numbers, we'd see well known classics up the charts too. That doesn't mean that viewers don't want new content to watch- likely you would see classics go up when there isn't new content to watch [just throw on an episode of Friends!].

I'm actually excited to see non-Netflix shows on these charts, because this is a signal to Netflix to maintain access to non-Netflix show libraries.

Until recently one of the big problems of streaming licensing was that the rights were almost always sold exclusively, meaning if Netflix had show A but then Hulu won the bidding war for show A in the next round, Netflix had to get rid of it. As evil as Zaslov and his ilk are, this newer round of changes in the industry seems to be opening up the option for non-exclusive licensing. That's really the only way you're going to avoid having a subscription to every major network app (Peacock, Paramount+, Max, Netflix, etc) in order to have a good catalog of stuff to watch.

And frankly I'm tired of dealing with the uneven experiences of these apps, and having to keep a mental map of what show is owned by who in order to jump in to watch these shows without a JustWatch Google search every time. It would be nice if there was a decent shot of just trying an app and having a show I want to watch on it.

> I'm sure if we had music numbers, we'd see well known classics up the charts too.

We do have that, don't we? The music charts are literally a chart of the most popular music.

"Popular content is popular" surprise.

Also this is the re-establishment of a "canon". It's not bad to have a set of shows that "everyone" has seen, but to get there takes a lot of views.

Why is it sad? If that's what people like, that's what people like. I pretty much exclusively watch Bob's Burgers reruns.

Your quote left out "subject to a confidentiality agreement". Streamers are not obliged to make this information public, and I don't expect companies like Amazon to do so since they're extremely secretive about viewership numbers.

Interesting- I'm not sure there's been any streamer more secretive than Netflix about its numbers though.

Nice eye — I did do remove that clause, but because the understanding in the industry is that the data shared with Guild members (for which there are 12k WGA writers and 100k+ SAG actors) can still be shared by those members. And even if they can’t, someone would likely leak them: good luck finding who broke an NDA with that many members!

I.E. They do not have to release the numbers publicly, but they’re not really bound by NDA either.

I imagine most, if not all, will go the direct route so they can spin the numbers how they want.

> Nice eye — I did do remove that clause, but because the understanding in the industry is that the data shared with Guild members (for which there are 12k WGA writers and 100k+ SAG actors) can still be shared by those members. And even if they can’t, someone would likely leak them: good luck finding who broke an NDA with that many members!

No, the Guild would assemble an audit committee of likely three people or a third party auditor would be appointed. It absolutely wouldn't be shared with the entire membership. It would be extremely easy to find the source of a leak, and they'd be subject to ruinous penalties.

This is existing practice in a few areas.

This is fantastic!! Excited to see more data from the other providers, and perhaps building useful things around the data :-D

I expect they fought for, and won, something that will ultimately work against their best interests.

Netflix etal. didnt hide this data to pay writers less, they hid to to juice their stock price. If they disclosed how few views they recieved for the piles of cash they were throwing at original content the magic money tree would have dried up.

What is really insane is that stockholders didn't press this, but then you remember that most stock is held in trust by the likes of BlackRock who couldn't give less of a damn, and it all makes sense.

Said stockholders as well as the VCs had/have the exact same incentive as the management of Netflix, namely to see the price of the pieces of paper they hold increase in value.

And then the WGA and SAG would’ve gone back to primarily working on network television, as they have since the 60s—as that sector of the industry has shown it actually knows how to run a sustainable business.

If Netflix can’t run a sustainable business, then it’s everyone’s best interest—workers and investors—that they shut it down. That’s just business.

Their numbers suggest otherwise, though— that they can run an extremely profitable business, and now those they depend on can better negotiate for their piece of the pie.

I 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

Friends (1994) is still going strong

Probably a bounce due to the sad passing of Matthew Perry. :-(

These numbers were for Jan-Jun of this year.

I stand corrected! :-)

No... its a staple "background show" like having Seinfeld on in the background while you work or do chores.

You are baslessly guessing

Well, yes, I was :-)

Just making conversation :-)

Both Friends and TBBT are popular with (American) English learners.

> The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 That is just depressing IMO.. I don't understand the appeal to that show..

Eh. It's a pretty typical sitcom. Might not be your cup of tea, but they're widely popular

It also has a mind-boggling 12 seasons, which is going to shoot up the total hours watched.

Not if people stop watching. Remember that older network TV shows declined overtime. The first 2-4 seasons were really good. The next 2-4 seasons were good or OK. After that, quality tended to really decline.

It’s nerdy and pedantic and I like seeing that part of me made fun of.

I really love the show, I think it's a combination of likable characters and feeling special when you understand a physics/chemistry/scifi etc reference. It makes you feel smart because you are in on the references that the smart people are making.

Sure, but the show displays toxic masculinity as a dorky thing that "nerds" just do.

Overall, I believe the show is a terrible role model for how men who are in STEM fields should behave to others who do not fit the stereotype.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4

Tropes, Caricature, Mocking, Sterotypes... These things have been the tools of comedy for a LONG time. For good or bad they will remain that.

The problem is context, it's Lenny Bruce mocking the cop who is reading back his skit in court. It's Dave Chapel pointing out how people quoting him on twitter without the context miss the point...

These are made up people in a make believe world doing made up things. They aren't meant to be taken seriously on any level.

I'm not supporting the parent comment. But don't you think we as humans have a penchant for conflating the reel and the real and ending up reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world? If anything, we need less stereotypes. A caricature is fine, But after a certain point it just feels tiresomely pigeonholing into an idea.

> conflating the reel and the real

Love the sneaky word play! Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?

> ... reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world

The whole point of comedy is to take away the teeth behind these things. The act is meant to reshape culture and conversation. Stereotype, beauty, the perception of color, were very fungible and its just another tool!

I well written comment, by an obvious true student of comedy. +1

In reference to the first video: did the definition of 'misogyny' change while I wasn't looking? These guys don't seem to exhibit 'dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women'. They simply want to have sex.

Also, one of the main features of the show seems to be to point out the fact that, with respect to women: That's Not How To Do It. So, to claim that the show's writers are "doing it wrong" seems to be missing the point. It'd be like criticizing the writers of All in the Family for imbuing Archie Bunker with working-class conservative values. The whole point of the show was to illustrate how wrong he was.

For the first two guys, the video's point is that their sexual harassment, spying, and dehumanizing comments towards women are played for laughs without it being obviously wrong. The humor is in them being bad at socializing; their behaviors aren't addressed, and are portrayed as pathetic, socially repellent, but ultimately harmless.

The comments Sheldon makes are misogynist in the literal sense of the definition you gave, too, self-evidently so, IMO. The first video starts listing examples at 10:45. Again, the humor is just in the juxtaposition of average people's attitudes with his open contempt for women, with his bigotry acknowledged but never really addressed.

If all entertainment must conform to an idealistic view of society then it's just going to be really boring isn't it? I think a lot of people are not going to watch TV shows if they only portray the world in this highly moralized way.

I probably wouldn't like the characters or watch the show if they didn't make the jokes or have the quirks and shortcomings that they do.

The point is whether the artistic output is prosocial or antisocial. Different aspects can be different levels of one or the other: art, commentary, critique, education are all important. Reproducing awful antisocial behaviors without the attendant critique on those behaviors leads people to normalize and ultimately adopt those behaviors. We are social animals and time and time again it's proven that it doesn't matter if we're "socializing" with real people or fictional characters, we want to be part of a perceived in-group and so will act in ways that make us think we'll be liked by those whose gaze matters to us. Sitcoms are especially capable of stirring up these feelings since there is immediate social feedback (laughtrack) to the behaviors seen on screen.

I don't think you understand comedy.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is not an educational show about how to manage a pub.

Almost every character in It’s Always Sunny is clearly a bad person or outright evil, that’s the whole point.

Big Bang does nothing like that, you’re supposed to like the characters.

Wow, that’s a cumulative 47,990 years.

We could be so much wealthier!!

Sometimes I sit and think about how one of the highest paying companies in the world sells unproductivity as a service. There's free options for entertainment like YouTube too.

Could be worse. Other companies sell diabetes, lung cancer, and debt.

There's nothing wrong with being unproductive. We should totally rest and enjoy life once we've covered our needs for the day. This thing about productivity being a goal of society is stupid. Who says being productive leads to happiness?

I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.

HN is a site where you hear people unironically talk about how they listen to audiobooks and podcasts at higher speed to optimize how many they can take in.

Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological. Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.

I don't know where this compulsion starts, but it's a little disturbing.

> Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.

That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements".

It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch.

Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as a primary goal. If we were struggling to produce enough food then, sure, productivity would be a big problem. But we produce an excess of food. So much so that obesity and diabetes are a problem now. This goes for everything: I can't think of a single thing in life where I think "if only we were more productive I'd be happier". At some point we really have to learn to just be happy.

The other part is the tendency of people to focus on simple metrics and neglect anything with nuance. Things like number of books you've read this year, how many people you manage, how much money you earn. All simple numbers, all essentially meaningless outside of a much broader context, but all pursued with laser focus for no particular reason.

At this point in my life I earn more money than ever, I have more stuff and, yes, I'm more productive. But am I happier now than when I got my first cheap car (that I could now buy every month without even sacrificing anything)? Am I happier than when I first had sex? Am I happier than that day I cooked a splendid boeuf bourguignon for my student house? Of course not.

The "meal replacement" industry is exactly what I am thinking about. I know some of them are marketed as essentially premade low-caloric meals, that theoretically make it easy to do calorie-counting. At least that has some kind of niche application that I get the use-case for.

But those other ones, are freaky - the ones that are designed to be allround [food] for humans, in the same way that a dog can eat exclusively a specific type of dogfood indefinitely. Why the need/desire to do this? It's like something out of classic dystopian sci-fi, only it's chosen voluntarily by people with access to real(ish) food, and they pay a premium for it.

I think you're correct about this effort to cram more 'stuff' into life instead of taking our time to engage with less in a deeper way, being counterproductive to the things that make us happy. Maybe some internalized mindset of productivity for its own sake, completely unmoored from the managerial context? Some kind of cargo-cult type performance to attract what - prosperity? Happiness?

I don't really have a good answer for why this happens, but it's certainly interesting.

I'm definitely a niche, but as someone who has never been a super big eater and has lost most of my sense of taste, this kind of product seems great.

That said, for me it has nothing to do with productivity. I just want a single meal I could repeatably consume to maintain a healthy diet. (Ideally, with as little effort as possible on my part because it all taste the same to me)

Depends on the quality of the art. Drama: 1x, comedy news show: 1.7x, non fiction podcast: 2.3x

Youtube is not free, or not really entertaining, rather the opposite.

Imagine how much time we could use if we also skip other wasteful activities like eating and sleeping! :-)

or healthier

It had an interesting characters at first, but then it quickly devolved into relationship show with all the character adjustments necessary to make it happen.

I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy Seinfeld. It is an equivalent of chips and icecream. Filling, but ultimately bad for you.

Putting Seinfeld and Big Bang in the same bucket hurts my soul. Not sure how either are bad for you though. People need a way to decompress and a 22min sitcom is a great way to transition from one mood to another.

I will admit it is not a perfect match, but both have a laugh track and both remain very popular. I think I may have been trying to get an agreement from several generations of sitcom enthusiasts.

How about Big Bang and Scrubs? Both are kinda silly and both kinda got bad the same way.

Seinfeld was recorded in front of a studio audience, so the laughs are real. The thing is though that they often did multiple takes of each scene, and the laughs are sometimes the ones from different takes.

Big bang theory was also recorded in front of a live audience..

Regardless of your opinion of the show I don't understand why you'd be "depressed" about other people's entertainment choices.

Lamenting the future of humanity is a time honored pastime.

So is asserting that everyone is crazy, except you. :P

Because they influence the perception and renewal chances of my entertainment choices.

Which show has been cancelled because of TBBT, a show that ended almost 5 years ago?

To be fair, it's a definite truth that shows get more chance of funding based on what is popular and how it fits into that perceived potential popularity.

So TBBT is a part of the overall zeitgeist, an example of a show of its type that was very successful.

You bet if a sci-fi show was number 1, than other sci-fi shows would be being made and better funded.

What is sad is that popular comedy shows on Netflix and elsewhere are old network shows.

America doesn't know how to make comedy anymore. I blame Twitter.

Uk is going through a comedy golden age last decades. I attribute it to bbc doing an excellent job giving chances to younger comedians on gameshows like mock the week, qi, 9 out of 10 cats, im sorry i havent a clue etc... as well as the prominence of edinburgh fringe

I think this sort of talent development really is just about giving chances to new folks, its the risk averse large networks only re-hiring the same older folks that stifles an artistic sector, be it movies, shows, music, games, comedy etc

I don't see anything on Netflix that is trying to compete with TBBT, which is a CBS show firmly targeted at Middle America.

If anything, Netflix comedies are the opposite of TBBT, there's no audience laughter, it's all single-camera like Arrested Development, The Office and other 2000s-era neo-sitcoms.

The more people watch TBBT, the more Netflix is motivated to maintain the license to keep it in the library (and while I'm not positive about this, I thiiiiink the more they have to pay to maintain that license).

Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.

It's the same thing as cable: by paying for a Netflix subscription, I'm partially paying for them to keep TBBT on their network, and I don't think it's a stretch to say if they didn't have TBBT they'd have a (or more than one) different show instead, that I might be more interested in.

TBBT isn't specifically the problem. But it's pretty emblematic of the lowest-common-denominator chaff that's currently clogging up streaming services. I don't even think it's a bad show, necessarily, in of that people do get joy from it. But I think broad-appeal, low risk, low effort content is horrendously overvalued in our society compared to more interesting, creative work, which is honestly not that hot of a take.

Tl;dr I want more people to like the sorts of things I like so that they get more financial support and become more prevalent compared to the sorts of things I care for less. This is not an unusual take.

> Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.

On the same token, money spent keeping TBBT on the network reduces customer churn and increases earnings, which can be invested in other shows.

TBBT is the symptom, not the problem. Netflix would be delighted to not pay CBS a fortune every year. The problem is that Netflix doesn't have enough customers whose tastes skew towards your own.

The problem is that Netflix doesn't have enough customers whose tastes skew towards your own.

And another way of putting that is "I find it depressing how many people watch TBBT (compared to shows I prefer)"

If that's the case it makes more sense to say "too bad show x isn't more popular".

I also feel that way.

There's just a lot of depression rn.

Just open youtube in a private tab and tell me you dont immediately become depressed about other people's entertainment choices.

Those are Google's algorithm's choices. The algorithm shapes what people watch, instead of giving them what they'd choose to watch naturally

I understand the Big Bang Theory appeal, it's a turn your brain off show for humorless people.

However Suits is insufferable to watch.

What would you think makes Suits insufferable to watch?

Well some might argue that every episode is the same formula. Watching season 2 or 10, you’re like watching the same thing over and over.

Not really thinking it’s a big problem personally, lots of shows follow very similar formula, but I did end up stopping to watch after a few seasons as I did get tired of it.

A lot of sitcoms don't appeal to me until I had problems in my life

Suddenly I found them relatable and amusing, the exact kind of escape I needed

then other things I valued became accessible again and took up my time again and I don't find shows like that appealing

Its really just to say to consider revisiting it in a different phase of your life

It's a warm show about people who care about each other where the drama comes from social misunderstandings.

The initial pilot featured a more conniving Penny played by a different actress. The focus group feedback was "Someone keep that mean girl away from those sweet boys".

Think of it as a show for moms / grandmothers / aunts of nerdy men. They want to see them get up so some shenanigans but generally be OK.

It's also a low effort show to watch so you can throw it on in the background while you're doing other things.

> you can throw it on in the background while you're doing other things.

Nobody asked, but my thing to watch like this is everything-Star-Trek (TOS, TNG, V, Ent, etc. including the movies)

The problem is Star Trek is actually intellectually stimulating so if I throw in on in the background I end up just watching it, unfortunately.

It's easier when you have seen all the series a few times over.

Dude. It blows my mind there are over 25 episodes per season of most of the older series. I know most of the series had rough starts, but they really get good in the later seasons. I tried to tell someone to just watch it, and tell them how in Season 3 or 4 it gets really good. That means, you just gotta watch 50-75 episodes to get to the good stuff. LOL. That doesn't seem to convince anybody.

I mean, personally I love the early episodes just as much. But trying to get other people into it hasn't been successful for me.

Also I love starting on a long binge. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes to watch! Peak Star Trek for me is DS9 when they start to get heavy into the Dominion war. Sisko is such a badass. He's my favorite Captain.

Dude. You realize you can skip the earlier seasons, right? Like just jump to season 3 or 4. So don't watch the first three or four seasons of MAS*H. Just jump to the seasons when Sherman Potter is ther.e

What a rude reply. I was just sharing something I thought was funny, since most shows today only have like 8-10 episodes per season. To get through 2 seasons of TNG is like going through 10 seasons of a modern show.

Warm show? I admittedly haven’t watched many episodes, but they all seem somewhat casually cruel to one another, and not in a loving way you may tease a friend.

I always felt the stereotypes were truly making fun of geek/nerds, and somehow fooled folks into thinking they were in on the joke.

Warm is a word I have a hard time using.

> they all seem somewhat casually cruel to one another

So you're saying it's the same as just about any other sitcom?

Besides joking at one another's expense, a super common trope in US sitcoms is the lie to avoid embarrassment which builds up tension throughout the show, inevitably leads to exposure/confrontation and then resolution (forgiveness) near the end.

So many situations would be resolved quickly if the characters just 'fessed up immediately instead of trying to deceive the others to save face.

But then, there'd be no show with cheap laughs.

The first and only episode I watched revolved around one of the male leads training the female lead like a dog, by giving her food treats when she completed tasks for him.

I don't know if that was representative but I decided it was not for me.

Pop Culture Detective did a short set of videos on it that matched my first impressions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4

I don't know how to mesh that with Wil Wheaton speaking so fondly of his time on the show in his book. Even the updated one where he talks about his past views and behavior with exceptional self-awareness.

> It's a warm show about people who care about each other

I like that show, but no, it is not warm show about caring. It is fun show about mutual abuse. Like I said, fun and all, but in kinda cruel way.

My wife will put Friends on as a background to the day. So it might not be engaged watchers just people who want the noise and like the familiarity of the characters talking in the same way that radio fills the audio space.

In the spreadsheet the total of ALL the hours is 93,455,200,000 or ninety-three billion, four hundred fifty-five million, two hundred thousand hours.

And that's between January and June 2023.

If we say the typical working day is 8 hours and the week is 5 days and a typical full time worker works 42 weeks a year (factoring in holidays and sick leave), based on this report 55,628,095 or about 56 million years of human productivity spent staring at Netflix in the 1st half of 2023

Looking at it another way right now we have almost 8.1 billion people on the planet. The total hours reported in this spreadsheet averages to about 12 hours per person on the planet for the 1st 6 months of 2023.

Pretty mind boggling, especially when you consider this is only part of the story, compared to all the other entertainment media we spend time on (TikTok, Instagram etc.)

I never understood it either. My parents used to watch it together at top volume. My theory was that it was easy to watch, you knew exactly what was going on, it was familiar. When my mum died my dad would watch it alone at top volume, I guess it reminded him of her and a bit of comfort in a world that had suddenly gone unrecognisable, crazy and scary. I could never stand the grotesque yelling voices and hysterical laughter and I would ask him to mute it or switch it off when I came visiting with my son. I can't imagine I will ever watch an episode but I derive a weird sort of mild comfort knowing that it's there.

Suits is still huge... I still wonder why all the MM hate. The show isn't unpopular and definitely not because of her.

For scale, 100M hours is about 143 lifetimes.

Night agent came out this year and is 10 episodes. I didn’t check but assuming it’s 1hr/ep that’s 80million viewers. Wow

Ps. Checking a popular torrent site and roughly adding up the download count for all the season rips and adding a representative number from some of the individual episodes. Then multiplying that by 10 because there are other public torrent sites and many private ones we get 60k x 10. Even if you do x 20 it’s roughly 1 million. Out out 80 million that’s just 1-2%

Basically no one in my age group (gen z) knows what Torrents are let alone is able to use them. Most piracy happens via sites like s dot to.

Gen Z fallen to the fallacy that you won’t own anything, smh

Just think of all the amazing content from decades past, even movies from not long ago in the 90s, that many gen z will never see and experience and enjoy in their whole lives because they can’t buy or rent or play dvds any more, don’t use torrents, and streaming providers have very little content from years or decades past. It a loss.

A legitimate reason to own a current-gen gaming console: unlike most gaming PCs, they still have optical drives.

But then you still need to get the DVDs from somewhere and most people don't want to buy a movie just to watch it, and renting DVDs is a thing (mostly) of the past.

Your local public library is a great source for these--they even have Blu-Rays! I used to take out disks all the time, until my kids came along

I think that’s highly regional, and probably limited lifespan. Enjoy it while it lasts. Here in Europe, I haven’t seen a DVD or a CD in a library in many years.

God! I just went there. I hope they know how to use ad blockers at least lol

They might not know torrents per se, but I think most at least know that stremio and popcorn time exist - I have no sources, but I'd expect most torrents nowadays to be consumed that way.

The Night Agent was not good enough that you would want to go through the effort to pirate it, but it was slightly good enough to watch if you had nothing else to do after a hard day of work. I had no idea it was that successful, now I feel sort of bad for contributing to it.

I'm surprised that I wasn't the one who wrote this review!

I guess the lesson to take away from all this is there are a lot of people who are tired after a long day at work and are willing to waste their time on something acceptable instead of trying to choose something better.

Read 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”

> 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.

This 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.

>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...

    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.

It’s not just about how many people watched certain TV shows, it is that people who didn’t own or watch TV would know about such shows through daily conversations.

Paul Graham has an essay that touches on that

http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html

>And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.

I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.

> I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.

I very much miss the shared social experience. In the 90s, you'd go to school on Monday and run down the latest X-Files episode. VCRs existed, but worst case you watched it later that night. Otherwise you missed out on the discussion.

Then the next week SNL did a parody and everyone got it because everyone saw the thing they were parodying.

Now that happens much less frequently. It still happens sometimes. When Wednesday came out, even people who hadn't seen the show knew what it was about. Same with Squid Games and Stranger Things.

If you want to see some data, check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio...

The ratings share is what you want to look at. That roughly represents the percent of all households with TVs who watch a show. Look at the highest rated show for each year and what percent of people watch it.

Back in the day to be the highest rated, you had to be over 60%. Now a top rated non-sports show is maybe 10%.

Interestingly what I see now that I have my own kids is that they don't talk about scripted TV much at all -- they talk about video games and YouTube/tiktok videos that they all seem to have seen. So that seems to be where the social aspect is moving.

A really big part of the bond between my girlfriend and me is that we are almost the same age, from similar families and had all the same TV and radio growing up. We actually have very different musical tastes, but we both know and like all the familiar stuff from the 90s.

I've had many relationships where we've been very different ages or grew up in different countries and it's surprising how much is missing from such a relationship. I could always tell this by observing former partners relish talking about this stuff on the occasion they meet someone in their own group. I, of course, couldn't join in.

The fragmentation started in the 90s, though. Already there were kids who had watched the football last night. Or they'd seen something American, like a film. These were available on subscription only TV (which I thought only rich families had, but, in fact, it was mostly families bad with money). More and more stuff went to paid TV, like cricket and boxing, that used to be available to all. Then you had kids who had inexplicably seen all of something like South Park despite it not being on any public channel. It steadily grew from there to the extent I wouldn't even be surprised if kids from non-football families don't know what Manchester United is, for example.

It's more common water cooler talking points. Like the superbowl, the reality is, most people have shallow investment in the shared culture. You get proficient making small talk on popular topics that doesn't really matter on an individual level. Like how everyone is trained to talk about the weather, but they're not going to form many durable relationships off it. Unless they're genuinely interested, like football fans in superbowl. It's "time pass" topics, it's not nothing, but it's overstated. There's a reason why people jumped to communities that better aligned with individual interests as internet got more social, very people liked wasting their time on mediocre pop culture. Don't get me wrong, they exist in great numbers, but my feeling is still all this cultural commonality facilitates weak bonding among most people who would rather watch their niche interests on youtube given the chance than speculate on the last nights Xfiles.

Speaking as a millennial, I also think the syncness is overstated. It's always interesting when pre 90s generations reminisce about all these cultural consumption they had in common, but then realize they experienced them at different times. Access to media was not ubiquous pre internet, you either need disposable $$$ which many people didn't have, or need to have a hookup for bootleg. Many people can grow up hearing about HBO shows and didn't get to watch them until years later when file sharing proliferated. There is still a "vast" cultural common ground in the sense that... there actually wasn't so much content and what people remember / make effort to watch end up overlapping. Now there is legitimately so much broadcast media out there that I imagine it's hard to accidentally overlap. Something has been lost, but as someone who didn't like small talking about that stuff, but I am not sure that much.

Yes, this was also my experience reading the list. Apparently I'm even more bubbled than I thought.

> Growing up 30 years ago, everybody knew the top 5 TV shows

To be fair 30 years ago there were probably only 20 or so new/big TV shows to watch and those shows tried to cater for all viewers - age/sex/background etc. Today the choice is much greater (and probably includes those 20 or so shows somewhere) as producers can create content that only specific demographics will be into but the international streaming nature means that enough people will watch.

The most popular shows today are those watched by younger viewers.

Yes, it's strange to watch my children not have the same 'shared experience' of TV that I had, although things like the Mandolorian did push them in that direction.

However they do share the experience with knowing what YouTube, TikTok, Insta shows to follow/watch within their friendship group - easier sharing maybe? dunno too old.

The same also applies to music now I think.

I'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

"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.

"Beef" was the only Netflix show I liked in a long while. Have since canceled Netflix.

I thought the live action One Piece was amazing!

My 14 year old boy loves One Piece anime, so we watched it together so I could see what it was all about.

It’s a surprising substantial TV show in its own right, and for once a fantasy TV is just good fun without trying to hard to be serious drama.

One interesting difference is that in the TV show Luffy has a friendly smile on most of the time. In the anime Luffy runs around with a wide eyed unblinking psychopathic stare.

Also less objectification of women in the update.

Witcher S1 is at row 171

Witcher S2 at row 233

Witcher S3 at row 556

I 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.

The TV show made it hard to follow.

The games are fairly easy to get I’d say.

I thought season 1 was straightforward once you understood the dual timelines

> 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.

I think that’s supposed to be intentional though. It didn’t click with me either even though in retrospect characters in the future are reflecting on their pasts that were shown in the very same episode.

I thought it was a really good execution tbh. It’s rare to see fantasy play out the effect of different lifespans

I'm the same, something as simple as `$year` at the bottom of the screen when switching about would have helped me immensely. It was disorienting enough that it put me off watching any of the further seasons.

I think the writers were being too clever.

It does not help that main character only grunts in the show instead of talking. The book version of Geralt is the most talkative swordsman ever, so you learn a lot from dialogs or his thoughts. When you replace dialogs by grunts, you loose a lot of information.

Upvote for Beef.

As with some shows the description doesn’t really do it justice.

It has a lot more going for it than the premise suggests!

The Witcher was pretty bad in its last season. I know multiple people who just stopped to watch it, because the show was too annoying for millions of reasons. I mean, I myself could not handle last series. Not just because of "faithfulness to source" issues, but because pacing, insufferable dialogs, characters that done makes sense etc.

And the series before that would be fine if it was not called the Witcher, but as it was it made any reasonable progress impossible.

The obvious question: do you watch a lot of TV shows on Netflix? Because these are all [edit: not all, but mostly] Netflix originals/exclusives.

I ask because as a Netflix user, these titles are constantly being pushed to me when I open up the app.

Not anymore but even If I haven't watched it I'll probably hear about it from friends/online/twitter etc if it's any good.

These are not all Netflix exclusives - I see "Breaking Bad: Season 5" on here, Minions: The Rise of Gru, etc.

I've heard of plenty of them, but only watched a few, and only watched maybe two of them more than once. But I watch weird back catalog documentaries and such that I wouldn't expect to be crowd pleasers.

Stephen Fry described TV as the nation’s fireplace, with the implication that shared viewing of a common canon strengthens cultural connections with other people.

It’s like how millennials can drop a Simpsons quote into a conversation with their peers and everybody gets the reference.

Peak TV has annihilated this. Nobody watches the same stuff anymore.

Did you catch the latest season of Current Thing? No, because there’s no Current Thing any more, there’s a thousand of them.

The more we watch, the more isolated we become.

Less pessimistically, we now have content for a broader diversity of tastes - greater than ever before. As a result, people can choose to watch shows socially with friends, as well as have content just for themselves. And consuming that content can lead to finding new social groups based on shared interests, if they do desire.

I find the diatribe of "things got better, we got worse" so... boring and antisocial? You never magically made friends, you have always had to make them. There are now tools specifically to help you do this, and your pool has become unrestricted to the geographical region of your job. It's easier than ever, it's more likely you're just overwhelmed by the change.

But even that's fine - I made a new friend today while out and about. Just from talkin' like "the good ole days".

What We Do In The Shadows is extremely queer and has managed to develop significant reach, and that makes me happy. I thought some of the jokey bi stuff in the first season would be throwaway like usual, but they keep dialing it up.

The writers are very well-versed in the vampire meta, and it shows.

Idk. On one hand all the main characters are gay or bi (I think Collin is?). On the other it’s almost entirely a non issue. The vampires have no concept of gay culture at all. As a straight guy with no particular connection to in group lgbt culture this seems preferable. It’s often culturally alienating. What we do in the shadows is comfortably normative

> There are now tools specifically to help you do this

Out of curiosity, not disagreeableness, which tools are those?

Afaik, overall, we are more lonely then ever. People are not making friends, they are sitting home lonely and isolated.

I thought about this recently. Ideas is what in theory kept American society going. For a while, as the society started to lose track of what it wants to be ( and people in charge not exactly keen on educated populace ), it was the idea of American destiny and uniqueness and freedom and so on.

Shared TV space replaced those 'shared values' state tried to indoctrinate people with 'shared current thing', which had to indoctrinate people to state propaganda AND sell stuff for companies.

Those shared values have to replaced with something.

I want to say something pithy like 'but now its memes or tiktok shorts', but I can't get sufficiently worked up.

Stuff that comes out weekly seems to do better on cultural impact. ~Everyone's seen the Invincible memes.[0][1] I see What We Do In The Shadows references all the time.[2] There are a few shows I've never watched, but know bits and pieces about through stuff like this.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-the-neat-part-you-dont

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/look-what-they-need-to-mimic-...

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2470104-sheher-theythem-cool...

I have not seen the Invincible memes.

That's the neat part, you have now.

Given that I subscribe to meme groups, participate in #meme slack groups - and am bombarded by memes incessantly in twitter - I was surprised to see that I didn't recognize any of your memes.

Hahaha this is hilarious and a massively unintentional strengthening of a point being argued against.

Many of us haven’t seen those shows or memes your bubble is your bubble only. That is the entire point and thrust of this comment thread.

Then this comment comes in and is all ‘actually we’ve all seen these’ and we are all like…… nah?

Good time to mention that 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of MASH.

To this day it's still in the top 10 of most viewed television events with the other being primarily sports events (e.g. Super Bowl etc)

...and that was after 11 seasons!

And it's still one of the best pieces of television ever made. My own personal canon would be that, _Ozymandias_ (Breaking Bad), _The Pine Barrens_ (The Sopranos), and honorable mention to the finale of _Blackadder_. What's anyone else's nominations?

Gotta mention Succession as a very recent example of great TV and great season finales.

as estimated by a sampling of 1700-5500 homes.

    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

Are you saying that viewing number is dubious because the panel is small?

~2000 is a pretty decent sample size. The viewing numbers you should be skeptical about are the very small ones which will have huge error bars, not the huge ones.

There are definitely still Current Thing's though - Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Squid Games. They'll come and go. There's also the 'in-joke' kind of references from more niche shows that can form a stronger connection than the big thing of the day.

If you think that Game of Thrones counts as Current Thing then you've fallen behind

No, it's just that one discusses these media in different venues than the public square. For example, if I watch something, I will inevitably find people talking about it on various fora, such as its subreddit. In that way, one is still able to latch onto the common canon. And this is even before saying anything about cultural phenomena like Game of Thrones.

In the top 50, I've see Night Agent (give it a 7), Luther (6-7), Extraction 2 (6).

I've heard good things about Beef, and maybe Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope is novel because it's an 8 episode heist show that, in theory, can be watched in any order and be cogent. Arguably, this is one reason I have not watched it. Not a big fan of gimmicky things.

Of course there's also the bit of the "how can there be 18,000 shows and nothing to watch?"

I don't watch any TV, with a few exception for prestige shows that everyone else is watching - and I recognized a lot on that list - Walking Dead, Suits, Grey's Anatony, Gilmore Girls, Breaking Bad (which I've watched), Friends, Lucifer, Big Bang Theory.

I'd say give Breaking Bad a try. It regularly comes up in "Best TV Show of All Time" conversations.

Based on the synopsis, I expected to NOT like Breaking Bad, but Bryan Cranston's performance was superb. I will never be able to see another Los Pollos Hermanos with a straight face again.

Surely you’ve heard of the Walking Dead?

Related articles (via threads that we've merged hither):

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-release...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-12/netflix-r...

https://www.ft.com/content/87f3dcec-ec8b-4c6c-9555-8d350e962...

I 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

FWIW, the Night Manager is leagues better than the Night Agent.

Slightly 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".

Is 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?

It 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.

Lots 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.

Possibly 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.

They 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.

I heard the "no license" theory before but I find it hard to believe because Netflix originals suffer from the same problem.

What's really annoying is when you turn on the CC subtitles and someone speaks a foreign language. The on screen subtitle gets covered with an unhelpful "[speaking Japanese]"

That's an artistic choice: the POV character in that scene doesn't speak Japanese, so viewers receive information limited to their perception.

Languages are handled differently in truly multi-lingual media. Watch _Invasion_ for a good example (the first season is amazing, but we didn't care for the second). There, the audience gets subtitles for everything, so viewers often know more than the characters do. There's a beautiful sequence in the desert where two men, unable to understand each other's language, pour out their hearts to each other, and - unwittingly, and across a cultural chasm - share the same hopes and fears.

There's a third way of handling language, which I hardly ever see: the characters on-screen understand each other, but the audience doesn't. The _Star Wars_ by-play between R2-D2 and C3PO is the most accessible example. This is engaging because viewers have to fill in the blanks to infer what one or more of the characters have said.

You might prefer that everything be of the second type, but keep an open mind! The creators probably had a reason for making the choice that they did.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I'm afraid you badly misunderstood the comment you replied to.

They aren't complaining about closed captions failing to translate foreign speech.

They're complaining about the specific instance where the show/movie has English subtitles for that foreign speech already built in and showing on the screen, and when the closed captions show "[speaking Japanese]" it overlays the translation that the filmmakers intended the viewers to receive, preventing them from experiencing the filmmaker's artistic choice.

Ah! OK. I did misunderstand, and I agree that's irritating. Thank you.

The POV character might not speak Japanese, but some viewers without hearing difficulties might, so Japanese-speaking viewers using CC shouldn't be discriminated against. Or the Japanese phrase might be "konnichiwa", which most people would understand. Or it might be a commonly used term, like "Cinco de Mayo". The subtitles shouldn't cop out with [speaking foreign language], but instead put the foreign phrase in the subtitles if it isn't meant to be translated.

I'd argue that if the director decided that the characters should not understand what's being said, then its better if the audience doesn't know either.

For a particular example, it is my understanding that the movie "The Thing" is thoroughly spoiled right at the beginning if you speak Norwegian.

I strongly prefer closed captions, but maybe me not being native speaker is what changes it. It is easier to understand when I read what I hear.

Wait, is there a distinction between "subtitles" and "closed captions"?

"Subtitles assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they transcribe only dialogue and some on-screen text.

Captions aim to describe to the deaf and hard of hearing all significant audio content—spoken dialogue and non-speech information such as the identity of speakers and, occasionally, their manner of speaking—along with any significant music or sound effects using words or symbols."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning#Terminology

Closed captions also provide hints as to non-dialog audio; song lyrics, musical tones, important noises in the background etc.

Personally I always use subtitles, and closed captions if it's available; there are quite a lot of audio clues that I wouldn't otherwise know are even interesting, that get highlighted - mostly extra detail rather than plot important, but it does key you up to things happening or about to happen in the background.

Yes, that is annoying. I live somewhere that isn't natively English speaking and so I mostly only have the option to get subtitles in that language even though I read English much better than the local language. I can follow subtitles in a second language, but it's a fair bit more effort (and many people who live here can't do that at all.)

93,455,200,000 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.

Those stats only list shows that had over 50000 views, so depending on how long the tail is it could be much more

> In total, this report covers more than 18,000 titles — representing 99% of all viewing on Netflix — and nearly 100 billion hours viewed.

The quick math doesn't capture that not every hour viewed is an actively viewed hour.

~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.

My 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.

Sub 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?

Basically 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.

That 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.

Keep 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).

These 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.

Imagine if Google had a studio for TV shows; they would cancel everything after 1 or 2 episodes.

Nah they gave the shows like 2 months, and the studio lingered more than a year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi...]

Thos 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.

Makes me sad that the best show on/produced by Netflix (Narcos: Mexico) has so little hours watched compared to the rest (30,000).

This 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.

Incredible 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.

Us 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.

Surprised 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.

Me too. Though I personally enjoyed My Liberation Note more.

It 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

> 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.

The 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.

I 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.

Very 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.

I 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?

Take it from me, an out of touch old guy. It doesn't matter.

Why 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.

No, it’s the children who are wrong.

You 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.

I've seen the first episode of that; I should note that it was not called out in TFA ("C-f breaking" at least shows no hits).

It's not on Netflix in my region so I guess I'll go fuck myself.

That is a common time waster.

No 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!

Same. 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".

"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

/pedant

> 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.

So exactly the same as all entertainment throughout history?

Kinda 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.

Or, to look at it another way, they're giving their paying customers what they want.

Or, 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.

That'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.

They 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.

> 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.

So to summarize, customers are dumb & recommendation algorithms are hard. Conflating time watched with user enjoyment is much easier.

Sounds pretty similar to all mediocre companies out there.

I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.

> So to summarize, customers are dumb & recommendation algorithms are hard.

Or to not throw away all the points I argued for: There were a lot of good reasons for moving away from the five star systems, and the main motivation was providing a better less confusing UX

> I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.

The main thing that changed was that media companies woke up to streaming and stopped giving away the rights to properties that many people enjoy (mainly nostalgia shows + blockbusters) for cheap. That forced Netflix much more into media production of their own, which has it's up- and downsides, and gave Netflix the same warts that media companies always had (e.g. having to make hard decisions around canceling shows). It's a very clear case of a first-mover losing its advantage over time.

> Netflix also displayed the ratings as 5-star "adjusted ratings for the viewer", which already took your preferences into account.

It was not adjusted to your preferences. It was adjusted by algorithm to ... something that has nothing to do with my enjoyment.

Netflix, famously, had a public contents to try to improve the recommendation system, with very little success. [1] That system was a demonstrably good system, that maximizes preference, but only if you rate a bunch of content. I'm not aware if it's still in use.

But, I've rated many hundreds of shows/movies, and the rating is very accurate, for me. Very biased and scaled, but completely predictable/reliable.

In my case, the rating can be corrected with Netflix 7 being my 0, and Netflix 10 being my 10, mostly linear. For a Netflix show, 8 is my 0, since those are biased a bit more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize

0 means it wasn't worth the time. Negative means I disliked it.

> lowest common denominator of shows this is a good description, they've gone the CBS route with cable TV type programming, and Reality TV. There's been a lot of documentation over this- https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/bela-bajaria-global-tv-netf... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/how-much-more-...

I guess it's sadly what brings most viewers. I think there's some truth in the overall dumbing down of society.

But they are not giving people what they want. Netflix recommendations are notoriously bad and Netflix is not all that successful lately with its own shows. Even when they have actually good shows you would like, you rarely find them through Netflix recommendations - you need someone to tell you about the show.

You should try "Obliterated", its hilarious, it doesn't take itself aerious, it plays with almost all TV tropes we know (in a good way), references everything from Rambo to Die Hard and has an eye for detail (every scene hints at something or is important in some regard). Also, episodes 2-8, each roughly an hour, cover an in-series time frame of 7 hours, which is a bice touch. Throw in good acting, good dialogs and liekable characters and you uave a great show.

Bonus: No brand name stars in it neither.

Obliterated was universally panned by critics. But so have many shows which were panned in their era, and are now considered classics.

So would you recommend watching it?

Heck, absolutely! Doubly so if you liked the 80s and 90s action flips and Hangover!

For 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.

This 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.

I 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.

Just 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).

I see no contradiction. They're obliged to release this information but it may also suit their commercial interests.

There 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.

It 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

I'm guessing it's for the reasons they state.

They've gotten a reputation for canceling shows. Creatives feel that it's unjustified, and I'm assuming they feel that it's justified based on the numbers the shows are pulling in and the cost.

And they feel that transparency about this is the best way to demonstrate their case. That the data backs up their decisions.

Most network show cancelations come with low rating that everyone can see. This is their equivalent of releasing ratings so people can see the reasons for their cancelations.

This is a result of the union negotiations with the WGA, which demanded and won that all streamers disclose exactly this. Expect to see this for every other streaming service imminently.

https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won

Kind of funny that Netflix, the video hosting website, uses YouTube to host their videos on their website.

Youtube is for marketing. Netflix is for revenue.

Just like regular ads by TV channels on youtube.

Why 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?

Why 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.

Because 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.

Pretty cool to interact with this data using ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-pOGRX2Bx6-what-we-watched-a-nflx...

interesting 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.

Neat, 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-a8798d...

I 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.

I think you’re off by several orders of magnitude there

I 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?

The best discovery for me this year was Blue Eye Samurai. A masterpiece of action, beauty, timing, and more than passable writing.

This 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?

This report is a contractual requirement due to the union contracts, they're putting in the required effort and not one iota more.

To be fair the video is a recording of a telephone call with reporters, so basically an earnings call.

Crazy to see The Witcher Season 2 (renewed), Sandman (renewed) and 1899 (cancelled) so closely grouped.

The cancellation of 1899 was the last straw for me.

Give "Dark" a watch.

I 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.

Concur 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)...

> 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.

Exactly 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.

They even cancelled Shadow and Bone.

S2 is at position 32 with 192M hours viewed.

A spinoff for the Crows was even in the works, which was also canceled.

The 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.

I 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)

We’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.

I wonder what the numbers were for when the office was on Netflix.

I 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.

Sorry maybe I miss something, could somebody link the list of shows with hours watched?

You can find it here: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4cd45et68cgf/1HyknFM84ISQpeua6T...

Thank you

The report is an .xlsx file. Would be nice if there was a web viewer.

Huh, 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

I 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.

I 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

What 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.

Well that was the premise I doubted so…

I wonder what else humanity would have done with those 100 billion hours if it were not for Netflix.

In 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.

Its 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 :)

I 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.

I 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.

Background shows are common when people need to do an uninteresting task.

It's not even new. They used to hire people to read stories out loud while workers rolled cigars.

Do you work at 100% concentration and effectiveness 100% of the time?

Downtime is restorative and important.

During Q4 2022 the average US adult spent 294 minutes per day with TV, down slightly from 303 during Q4 2019. [1].

Nothing says restorative and important like sitting stationary on a coach watching TV for 5 hours per day while obesity and mental health issues are at an all time high. Its def important for advertisers. Stop excusing lazy and slovenly behaviors.

1 -https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-audiences-and-...

Netflix is probably the biggest "hobby" people have these days. Very sad.

I am proud for not being part of those stats. :)

Who else cancelled their Netflix?

With 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.

I 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.

Funny, 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.

Have you never seen netflix' recommendations? That must tell you how much they care about customer facing data.

This isn't a marketing effort, it's a press release for Hollywood insiders.

Really, 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.

The 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.

If they did put it into a slick data visualization, people would say "this is marketing, just give me the raw numbers". This is better because if we wait 2 minutes, someone will make a visualization of it anyway.

Based on my experience, I would imagine some management type grabbed the reins and claimed that the engineers just don't know how to present information! And then of course he proceeded to make the message worse and less clear.

They published the data. You are free to use whatever JS library of your choice to do that. Then you can come back and post a Show HN, then someone else can comeback with their Show HN of how it was rewritten in Rust/Go/Lisp just for the lulz.

Hell, it's tuesday, so by monday, I expect a "did it in a weekend" SaaS allowing uploads of boring raw excel data and receive a nice UI for the mere exchange of them a permanent and irrevocable license to use the data for any purpose commercial or not.

> uploads of boring raw excel data and receive a nice UI

https://datasette.io/

And was it just me or did the formatting cause massive lag in LibreOffice Calc, had to convert it to CSV first to make it usable

Don't worry, we can still blame discovery/promotion for lackluster viewing numbers when kvetching about what they chose to cancel.

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