The streaming service arena expanded considerably throughout 2018 and 2019. This in turn has created increased competition for Netflix. Most services now have a hit show or movie under their belt and tracking viewership is essential for investors. Netflix has just published their Q4 earnings report which also explains how they’ve changed their metric for tracking viewership.
Their original unit of measure was based on 70% of a show, or film, being watched. The new approach is being called a “Choose to watch” model. It counts viewership as when someone chooses to watch a show for at least two minutes. The idea is that at that two minutes the choice to watch was intentional. Netflix’s new reporting method is measuring roughly 35% higher viewership than the previous one. Using The Witcher as a new example they reported that over 76 million people clicked on the new show to watch.
Despite newly added competition from Disney +, CBS All access, Apple TV+, and DC Streaming, they did add 28 million new subscribers. New membership did, however, slow down in U.S. In the U.S. new subscriber numbers for Q4 dropped from over 1.5 million to just under 550 thousand from the previous year.