by Don Clarendon, TV Insider
Until a a decade or so ago, TV viewership stats were easily accessible through Nielsen ratings, and the only trick was knowing the difference between a ratings point and a share. But in the streaming era, TV viewership has become a guessing game.
Many streaming platforms don't share in-depth viewership data with the public, leaving it to companies like Nielsen, Luminate, and Parrot Analytics to estimate audience sizes for streaming TV series - for a cost.
And even then, streaming numbers for a given programme can differ from one analysis to another.
Net introduced its Top 10 lineup in February 2020, but that feature is only a ranking with no viewership numbers to be seen.
The streamer took another step toward ratings transparency in December 2023, when it started releasing twice-a-year engagement reports showing six-month viewership tallies for its offerings. That's progress, but streaming viewership data remains scarce.
When streamers are forthcoming, they tout their successes through various metrics. Here's some of the most common terminology in this evolving and often confusing field of audience measurement:
Hours/minutes viewed: The amount of time users have spent watching a given film or TV show. For hit TV shows - especially ones with many seasons available for streaming - this number can soar into the tens of billions of minutes.
Views/streams: The number of times a given film or TV show has been streamed. Netflix's latest engagement reports include the number of views as well as the hours viewed for each title.
Viewers: The number of people who watched a streaming title - or at least, the number of accounts that have. Amazon Prime Video and Max often use viewers as a metric for their public-facing viewership stats.
Cross-platform viewers: The number of viewers who watch a linear TV program live, on PVR, on-demand, or through streaming. As The Hollywood Reporter points out, a linear TV programme's streaming viewership numbers can be reverse-engineered if a TV network shares data about that programme's other viewership.
First X days: A qualifier for viewing statistics to show a film or TV show's reach and engagement over the first X number of days that the title has been streaming - the first 3 days, first 7 days, first 25 days, first 28 days, etc.
Completion/retention rate: The percentage of streaming viewers who finish a film or TV series, relative to the number who start it. The analytics company Digital I determined in 2022 that Netflix TV shows with completion rates below 50% were likely to be cancelled at the time, per What's On Netflix.
Binge rate: The percentage of streaming viewers who watch the episodes of TV series in rapid succession, relative to all of that title's viewers.
In its viewership report for the second half of 2024 the analytics company Samba TV shared that docuseries and crime dramas have higher binge rates - defined in that report as the percentage of 31-day season finishers who binged that season in the first 5 days — than comedies or other dramas.
Starters, watchers, and completers: Categorisations Netflix has used for its viewers, as revealed in a July 2019 letter to a United Kingdom parliament committee. "Starters" are households that watch two minutes of a film or a TV episode, "watchers" are those that watch 70% of a film or a TV episode; and "completers" are those that watch 90% of a film or a season of a TV series.
