Netflix is fine. It’s good. Yeah, I mean, it broke up with Friends on January 1, leaving many to wonder how the streamer would fare without one of its most popular TV offerings. But honestly, things are okay. New year, new platform, you know?
Ted Sarandos promised as much during a fourth-quarter earnings interview on Tuesday. When asked by interviewer Michael Morris, a Guggenheim Securities analyst, how the loss of Friends has impacted the streamer’s user engagement, Sarandos kept it brief.
“Nothing we can see or we can measure,” he answered, per Deadline. Cool. Fine. Then, perhaps realizing that the brevity of that response might raise some brows, Netflix’s head of content expanded on his breakup theory.
“We’ve had, over the years, incredible, popular product come on and off the service,” he said. “It expires, and typically what happens is, our members, through our incredible personalization, incredible library and deep library, are able to find their next favorite show. That’s what will happen with Friends fans. Some of them will find it elsewhere. Some of them will find their next favorite show.”
Netflix certainly has plenty of vintage series that will clamor to fill the void of Rachel Green and co. When you search for Friends currently, the streamer’s algorithm instead recommends The Office (another soon-to-depart sitcom), New Girl, and Grey’s Anatomy, among others.
Last year, tongues began wagging when it was revealed that a streaming shakeup would bring Friends, NBC’s beloved, undying sitcom, from Netflix to rival service HBO Max in 2020. Some wondered whether this move would dent Netflix’s subscriber numbers as users jumped ship to follow the sitcom elsewhere. Now it’s been 22 days—and so far, Netflix is still afloat. People are still logging on.
They’re also gobbling up original Netflix offerings. In that same quarterly meeting, the streamer revealed that The Witcher, a fantasy series starring Henry Cavill that debuted in December, broke viewership records and was watched by 76 million member households in its first four weeks of release. Impressive! But…there’s a teeny catch. As the Hollywood Reporter notes, Netflix previously calculated views by tallying up users who watched at least 70% of a TV series episode or feature film. Now, the company has changed course: It counts as a “view” any user who watches as little as two minutes of an episode or film, saying in its earnings report that this is “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional,” per THR.
“Our new methodology is similar to the BBC iPlayer in their rankings based on ‘requests’ for the title, ‘most popular’ articles on The New York Times, which include those who opened the articles, and YouTube view counts,” the company noted in the report, per THR. “This way, short and long titles are treated equally, leveling the playing field for all types of our content including interactive content, which has no fixed length.”
Naturally, this new metric has boosted Netflix’s overall reported viewership numbers; viewer counts are now 35% higher than previous rankings. This is perhaps more brow-raising than Sarandos’s initial Friends response, but Netflix has never been one for traditional ratings.
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January 22, 2020 at 10:04PM
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Netflix Swears It Doesn’t Miss Its Popular Ex, ‘Friends’ - Vanity Fair
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