Binge Box: Netflix Subscribers Are Now Watching 93 Minutes - a Day

We know someone who went into the hospital for minor surgery and watched six seasons of How I Met Your Mother in five days. But that news was greeted with scorn: he had an excuse - he had time on his hands. It's the people who are doing this while leading ostensible normal lives who are making the news.

This business of Netflix  making lots of movies and every episode of a popular tv shows available at the same time is having some unanticipated results on customer behavior. Like binge viewing. And we mean serious binging.

Netflix customers are now watching 93 minutes of shows and movies  - a day. Ok, that's on average, but stop to consider the implications: if a majority are being what passes for normal, downloading one movie or a couple of episodes a day, imagine what the real freaks are doing! How do they eat? When do they work? Do they work? Who pays for all this? And we won't even touch questions about bathroom habits.

The reality is that this is having a substantial economic impact: advertisers and marketers are trying to figure out how to respond to consumer preferences never before seen. Public policy debates, especially around issues of net neutrality are being affected as internet and cable providers argue that their systems weren't designed or built to handle this sort of load - about 45 gigabytes of data a month - so they should be compensated for the extra demand.

Psychology, sociology, political science...genetics? Who knows where this goes. Just get out of the way because these people are evidently not to be denied. JL

Janko Roettgers reports in GigaOm:

Just one more episode: All of your binge watching is adding up, to an average of 93 minutes of Netflix viewing per day, and around 45 GB of data every month.
Netflix subscribers around the world watch more than 90 minutes of video from the streaming service every single day on average, according to new estimates from The Diffusion Group, which also reported this week that the overall amount of Netflix streaming has increased 350 percent over the last ten quarters.
The Diffusion Group’s new Netflix report bases its estimates on streaming volume data released by Netflix. In January of 2012, Netflix said that its subscribers had watched a total of two billion streaming hours in the preceding quarter, which translated to a little less than an hour of average viewing time per day. In Q2 of 2014, that number had grown to seven billion hours, which equals 93 minutes of average viewing time per day.

As Netflix continues its international expansion, more and more of that streaming time comes from outside of the United States. In Q3 of 2011, 94 percent of all Netflix streaming hours were coming from U.S. subscribers, according to the report. Fast forward to Q2 of 2014, and the U.S. contribution to Netflix’s total streaming hours declined to 72 percent. Expect that number to go down even further in coming quarters as a result of Netflix’s most recent expansion into big broadband markets like Germany and France.

And with the amount of daily viewing increasing, subscribers are also consuming ever more bandwidth. Recent numbers from Netflix’s ISP speed index show that U.S. subscribers stream their movies and TV shows with an average speed of 2.57 mbps, which roughly equals 1 GB of data consumption per hour streamed. This means that on average, a U.S. Netflix subscriber is burning through 45 GB of data every month.

Of course, in reality, each consumer’s data consumption may vary widely. Netflix performs a lot better for customers of some ISPs, and worse for others. The individual service plan as well as the type of programming viewed can also impact a user’s data consumption. For example, Netflix advises its subscribers that 4K streams can consume up to 7 GB of data per hour. As the amount of 4K programming on Netflix increases, one should expect the average amount of data consumed to go up as well