After a decade of requests, Netflix is finally making some of its viewing data publicly available (you can download the data here). While it’s unclear exactly what the data mean*, it’s still pretty interesting. As you might expect, popular series are at the top (if a season is eight hours of material, that means one full-season watcher is equal to four viewers of a hour movie). Also, as I expected, most of what I like isn’t in the top 100 (though some of that is because those series or movies aren’t new).
One thing I did notice is that movies that have prominent space on entry pages have far more viewing hours than those you have to hunt for.
Anyway, the data are here, so have fun with them.
*For instance, it’s unclear:
- If minutes watched are rounded up or down.
- Is there a minimum number of minutes that have to be watched to qualify?
- How many people watch a movie or series all of the way to end?
That’s just a few things that are unclear, but it’s still an interesting dataset.
mikethemadbiologist
95% of what I watch is foreign language crime series. I even subscribe to 4 dedicated steaming services that specialize in foreign language series. On Netflix, with very, very rare exceptions (The Crown, for instance) I watch mostly foreign language series, and those never do well with GenPop. On Prime, I watch mostly foreign language series on Walter Presents, which is bundled with the PBS Masterpiece add on. So, this data is not really relevant to me unless it goes way out into the long tail.
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They say that “non-English stories … generated 30% of all viewing”. That’s pretty impressive. About 20% of Americans are bilingual. That’s more likely due to immigration than a boom in foreign language studies. Another factor is the terrible state of sound recording that makes dialog barely comprehensible. Many people with perfectly good hearing turn on captions so they can understand the poorly recorded dialog. If you are relying on captions, then the actual language of the production barely matters. Why not watching something in French or Japanese or Korean?
I subscribe to Netflix, but barely watching anything. It’s really hard to scrape together the big chunks of time needed to watch video which is why I ditched cable almost twenty years ago. I have too much stuff to read, and one can break up reading into smaller chunks. There is nothing like starting to watch a video to get a friend to call or a package needing a signature to arrive. I used to put things on my Netflix watch list, but by the time I settled down to click play, they would no longer be available. Nowadays, when I do watch, I watch DVDs.