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‘Stranger Things’ breaks Nielsen Streaming Viewing record by over a billion viewing minutes
7.2 billion viewing minutes is a lot of minutes!
A lot of people are tuning in to the Upside Down, so much so that Stranger Things 4 is breaking all sorts of viewing records.
According to Nieslen (via The Hollywood Reporter), the United States spent a collective 7.2 billion minutes watching the show the week of May 30-June 5, the week after the first part of the show’s fourth season — Stranger Things Vol. 1 — hit the streaming platform. Add in the 5.1 billion viewing minutes from the week before (May 23-29) when Vol. 1 first dropped, and you’ll get a total of 12.3 billion viewing minutes over the two-week period.
While those minutes count for every episode of Stranger Things, not just Season 4, Nielsen had previously said that over 75 percent of the first week’s minutes came from watching the latest episodes.
To put things in perspective, no streaming show has ever broken the 7-billion-minute mark in a given week. Ozark and Tiger King have come the closest with over 5 billion minutes each, but that’s still at least a billion short of Stranger Things. To put it even more in perspective, the second and third slots for the week of May 30-June 5 were held by The Lincoln Lawyer and Obi-Wan Kenobi, each of which garnered a seventh of Stranger Things' numbers with slightly over 950 million viewing minutes.
Netflix has also said that Stranger Things has become the most-watched series based on their internal numbers, with more than 930 million hours (that’s 55.8 billion minutes!) in Season 4’s first 28 days.
All these numbers point to one thing — lots of folks are watching Stranger Things. Perhaps Netflix was right to treat the series as its tentpole show, and that justifies (maybe) the $30 million per episode price tag and “episodes” that are longer than many movies.
You can add your own contribution to these viewing minutes by checking the entirety of Stranger Things 4 on Netflix, as Vol. 2 of the season just dropped.
Looking for more sci-fi TV? Check out shows like Resident Alien, Brave New World, Project Blue Book, Eureka, Heroes, Intergalactic, and more streaming now on Peacock. Looking ahead, SYFY has new series The Ark in the works from original Stargate film writer/producer Dean Devlin, as well as Stargate SG-1 producer Jonathan Glassner.
