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Comment by Oras | Hacker News Reader

Is the average monthly usage of Netflix 43h/month? That's 1.1 hours per day! Where does this data come from? Is it global or specific to a country? It seems like quite a lot.

Can't believe Spotify, which I assume people listen to during work or commute so would potentially be higher, has only 5 hours/month compared to 43h/month from Netflix. That's why I'm curious to know the source of the data.

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Hours of TV watched a day are unintuitive to me, and by my opinion absurdly high. I discovered a few months ago, this graph:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269918/daily-tv-viewing-...

Which completely shifted my understanding of TV consumption. Median daily UK linear TV viewing time was 3 hours in 2021.

I suspect the stat gets blown out of proportion by people who leave the TV on as background noise. I'll never personally understand having a TV in the bedroom, but I know folks who can't fall asleep without it on.

The GP said median, which should reduce the bias of the outliers.

It's median, but I think there's a similar effect actually. A lot of people "watch TV" as a side activity to something else (like browsing their phone). Alas, I've never been able to multitask as well as my digitally-poisoned peers.

Nothing complicated about it. The UK has an aging population, and older people tend to watch TV a lot.

Not the OP and certainly not my case (cause I don't have a Netflix account) but I have lots of people I know who do more than 1.1 hours per day on Netlix.

I'm talking mostly middle-class millenials from an Eastern-European capital city, but I'm pretty sure the same thing is in place in other locations, too. These people have effectively stopped watching television programming and it's all video-streaming for them now, mostly Netflix but also HBO Max and maybe Disney.

That seems eminently plausible to me. When I was growing up (and still the case for my parents, some of my childhood friends, etc.) at-home downtime meant TV time. This could easily be hours a day, especially on weekends.

The author does say:

> Warning: many of the numbers below are probably incorrect! Email me if you’d like to help make something more rigorous.

In any case, plugging in your own numbers would likely give you more interesting results.

I know retired people who sit and watch 10 hr a day of media.

I'm surprised by the cost. Is it really $23/month in the United States? I paid €13.50 a month, which seems to be about $14.50 for the ad-free level. And even that is a big price increase on what it used to be, which is why I unsubscribed...

4K plan is $23/mo.

Netflix plans and their prices in the US: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

You can get your own specific stats for Netflix using a Chrome Extension (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/netflix-viewing-sta...). I'm sure there are a few different ones, that was just the first google result.

Didn't work at all.

> Is the average monthly usage of Netflix 43h/month? That's 1.1 hours per day!

While the author doesn’t actually know how many hours subscribers spend, we do know that a subscription is used by several people in a household. If we take a conservative view of on average two people per subscription (e.g. you and your partner), a combined 1 hour per day seems very reasonable.

Netflix has a problem of multiple people sharing same account. So the number could be that of 2-3 people's watching time clubbed as one.

We typically watch a few hours of Tv each night. We’re all typcodojng something else, but we still have the TV on.

I work from home and have something on the TV all day, so these stats seem reasonable to me.

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