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What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

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Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#271

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.

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.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#272
post #66
post #35

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 616,8…

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

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.)

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#273
post #187

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…

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

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.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#274
post #206
post #161

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”

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. W…

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.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

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

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#277
post #187

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…

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

"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.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#278
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#279
post #67

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 ".

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.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#280

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…

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

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.

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