Netflix's final earnings results for 2019 are out (PDF), and in a year where it suddenly started to face more competition than ever before, the company says its service and content is only becoming more popular. The letter to investors claims that its new series The Witcher "is tracking to be our biggest season one TV series ever," and explains a new method for measuring those statistics.
To back up that claim -- and push back against belief that Disney+ and others are already starting to catch up -- it posted a Google Trends result showing The Witcher blowing The Mandalorian out of the water over the last few months, a result that holds up even if you add "baby Yoda" searches to the mix. Netflix's example also included The Morning Show on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime's Jack Ryan, although neither showed much impact by this metric.
Still, you'll have to grade that result on a curve, since Netflix also mentioned a change to how it's gathering those numbers, "Given that we now have titles with widely varying lengths - from short episodes (e.g. Special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g. The Highwaymen at 132 minutes), we believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70 percent of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense."
"We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title...The new metric is about 35% higher on average than the prior metric. For example, 45m member households chose to watch Our Planet under the new metric vs. 33m under the prior metric."
Now, if you watch something for at least two minutes, "long enough to indicate the choice was intentional" then it counts.
Developing...
Source: Netflix Q4 2019 results (PDF)
by: via https://www.AiUpNow.com/
