Netflix users burned a lot of time watching content in 2017, though metrics seem to point that users have been watching less and less on average over time.
In a year-end blog post, the streaming service announced that users watched more than 140 million hours of content per day, or 1 billion hours per week. As of Q3 2017, the company has more than 109 million subscribers, a little less than half of which are in the U.S.
While this is undoubtedly an impressive feat for the streaming service, compared to past metrics, it also suggests that users may be watching fewer hours of content on the service compared to years past.
Though there weren’t any similar metrics given for 2016, at the end of 2015, Netflix announced that the 74.7 million users it had at the time had watched 42.5 billion hours of content that year. That suggests about 570 hours per year per account in 2015, though the math is obviously a little rough as sign-ups occur throughout the year. Nevertheless, with 109 million users watching 1 billion hours per week in 2017, the average has moved to around 480 hours per account, suggesting that as the company has scaled, its users might not have been logging quite as many hours of screen time.
Competition in the streaming market has obviously picked up in this time as Hulu, HBO Go and Amazon’s Prime video service have invested in original content more heavily and grown libraries. Most of Netflix’s subscriber growth has also taken place in international markets during this time, as well, after they made moves in early 2016 announcing the expansion to 130 new countries.
On a more comical note, in addition to detailing total hours watched, the site laid out some bizarre factoids, highlighting the odd streaming habits of some of its users, including one account that streamed Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl each day for 365 days in a row and another that binged the entirety of Shameless while in Antarctica. More sane movie fans were also a plenty on the service — the average user watched 60 movies on Netflix.
Netflix stock is up about 50 percent year-over-year.