Netflix users watching 92 minutes a day, but YouTube remains king
Netflix pushed out 7 billion hours of content from April through June, spread over the 50.05 million subscribers Netflix said it had as of June. That’s nearly 92 minutes of viewing per day per subscriber, according to a new research report from The Diffusion Group.
The average Netflix subscriber, accordingly, could have snacked on about two episodes of “Breaking Bad” a day and wrapped up the entire series in 31 days.
But the research doesn’t reveal who is watching what, specifically. Netflix doesn’t break out those numbers, nor does it publicize hours spent by age range. Subscribers also sometimes share their account log-ins with friends and family members including children, who in some families spend many hours being babysat by Netflix cartoons and family movies.
Still, the Diffusion report is the latest to confirm that online viewing is chomping away at the time people spend watching traditional TV, which for now remains the most-viewed medium among U.S. adults.
The report found that Netflix streaming in the U.S. has tripled since the end of 2011 and grown tenfold internationally.
Paul Verna, a senior analyst at EMarketer, said Netflix’s original programming such as “House of Cards” is driving growth, along with an expanding library of streaming movies.
Netflix has also made itself available on a wide variety of popular streaming TV boxes to the point that “it’s become so seamless, like changing the channel,” Verna said.
Within the online video industry, Netflix remains dwarfed by YouTube. The Google-owned video website last reported in May 2013 that it streams about 6 billion hours of video each month, a figure that had risen from 4 billion in a few months.
Analysts at Jefferies recently pegged YouTube’s value, separate from Google, at close to $40 billion on the back of nearly $6 billion in annual ad sales. Netflix Inc., which doesn’t show ads, has a market capitalization of about $27 billion on what’s approaching $4.4 billion in annual revenue from online subscriptions.
YouTube slightly edged out Netflix as the most popular destination to watch TV shows online in a survey released this week by Frank N. Magid Associates, though Netflix beat YouTube as top movie destination.
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