It’s long been tough to track the audience for streaming broadcasts, with most of the information there a. coming from the company itself and b. released in only a limited manner for many specific properties. But there is a nice step forward there from Netflix, with the company releasing the first “What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report” (“a comprehensive report of what people watched on Netflix over a six month period”) Tuesday, covering viewing from January to June 2023.
This list is still information from the company rather than a third party. But it covers more than 18,000 titles, which they say represent more than 99 percent of all Netflix viewing. And it’s a major step up in data from what they’d previously released with weekly Top 10 and Most Popular lists, and the data here is at least comparable within the list.
And this information allows us to take a look at some of Netflix’s various sports properties and how they did in this span. There are several notable categories there, from season/event docuseries to documentaries on a particular subject or theme to sports-themed movies. And both programming released in this span and previously-released content showed up with notable numbers, with all the sports content in the below table amounting to more than 363 million hours of viewing globally in that time frame. Here’s a table showing that (also viewable here):
There are several key takeaways from this. One is that the season/event docuseries programming seems to be working quite well for Netflix, with the top four entries here all in that mold (the new Drive to Survive season at 90.2 million hours viewed, the first seasons of Full Swing and Break Point at 53.1 million and 30.5 million respectively, and the McGregor docuseries coming in at 41 million).
However, it’s worth noting that all four of those programs were freshly released during this span. Meanwhile, the movies at No. 5 and No. 6 (Hustle and Home Team) came out in 2022, as did many of the documentaries further down the list. It’s also worth noting that this is measuring hours of viewing, not individual viewers, so shorter programming like the movies and documentaries may be pulling more viewers than the longer-running docuseries. (The viewership information isn’t particularly obtainable from this; an approximation could be found by dividing hours watched by runtime, but we don’t know how many people watched entire series and how many watched a particular episode or part of an episode.)
For Untold in particular, it will be interesting to see how their third season released this August (featuring Johnny Manziel, the Florida Gators, and more) stacks up in the next one of these six-month reports. And on the movie front, it will be interesting to see if Netflix continues to explore sports-themed movies. Several of the ones here seemed to draw quite the audience even a year or more after their initial release, and did so despite quite negative critical reception in the case of Sean Payton movie Home Team.
There’s an important larger point there on the timing and the value Netflix gets from the long tail of viewership. While the new season of Drive to Survive was the biggest sports thing here, the previous four seasons of that show were seventh, eighth, 11th, and 12th on this list despite coming out years earlier. Some of that may be people rewatching ahead of Season 5, while some of it may be new fans of the show going back to see what happened earlier.
But that pattern’s seen for a lot of this content, with years-old documentaries and docuseries still pulling in notable numbers here. And that’s a further part of why Netflix seems more interested in docuseries and documentaries than actual live sports rights (with some exceptions), as the non-game content is far more evergreen and can get viewing for years and years. Docuseries and documentaries also tend to come with global rights much more easily than live games, which are usually broken down by country. And as this chart shows, that’s an important factor for a global streamer like Netflix.
It’s also worth noting where this sports content stacks up in the grand scheme of Netflix. Drive to Survive: Season 5 came in 114th overall on this hours-consumed list, well below the top two of The Night Agent: Season 1 (812.1 million hours) and Ginny and Georgia: Season 2 (665.1 million hours). And the 100,000 hour content at the bottom is tied for 14,408th overall. So while the 363 million hours of sports viewing here overall are significant, they’re still less than half of what the service’s very top shows are generating.
At any rate, it’s notable to see the numbers that Netflix has put out here. And it’s appreciated to see viewing listed for all of these properties, not just the new ones. We’ll see what their next report holds in six months; there will be plenty of sports content to look at in there, including their foray into live sports with the Netflix Cup. And it will be interesting to see how that content stacks up.
[Netflix]
