A new Nielsen report is highlighting the “staggering” amount of television that Americans have watched over the past few months. Despite its current troubles, Netflix was the undisputed champ, besting every single broadcast network thanks to streaming series like Ozark, Squid Game, and The Witcher. On the network side, the winner was also predictable: CBS, although the total there was just barely half of the viewing minutes pulled in by Netflix. (Netflix had 1.33 trillion — yes, trillion — to CBS’ 752.8 billion.)
More importantly, the Nielsen report reveals a massive amount of TV watching by American audiences, and that’s without factoring in HBO Max, or other cable channels, or other broadcast networks outside of the biggies, which were all left out of the calculations. Via The Hollywood Reporter:
Nielsen data showing total minutes viewed for the season so far (Sept. 20, 2021-May 8, 2022) show that Americans spend a staggering amount of time in front of screens. The big four broadcasters and the five streamers the measurement company publicly tracks (Apple TV+, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix and Prime Video) accounted for more than 4 trillion minutes of viewing time — or 203 hours for all 332 million people in the United States. That figure doesn’t include other streaming services, broadcast networks The CW, Univision, Telemundo and PBS or any of the dozens of cable channels.
Of course, it’s tempting to draw the conclusion that America is still in a pandemic, but that’s not exactly the strongest argument. While the Omicron variant did send cases through the roof over the holidays, the country has essentially been open for a while now, and even more so after the introduction of COVID vaccines. That said, the pandemic did delay many seasons, so when new episodes started coming in, Americans gobbled them up after months of watching reruns. The point is people are watching insane amounts of TV. Four trillion minutes. To put that in perspective, it is… so many minutes. An unreasonable amount of minutes, probably.
Sorry. Our brains hurt just thinking about it.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)