Netflix releases viewing data for the first time. Axed Aussie show was a hit

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Celeste Barber’s Wellmania was the most-watched Australian series on Netflix for the first six months of the year. But the most-watched Australian title of any sort was True Spirit, the biopic about solo round-the-world teen sailor Jessica Watson.

Those results are among the insights revealed by Netflix’s first publicly released engagement report, What We Watched, an enormous dataset that covers all titles on the platform that were watched for at least 50,000 hours between January 1 and June 30 this year.

Celeste Barber as Liv Healy in Wellmania.Credit: Netflix

“That’s over 18,000 titles, and nearly 100 billion hours, capturing more than 99 per cent of all viewing on Netflix,” the company’s co-chief executive officer, Ted Sarandos, claimed on an early morning call to media on Wednesday.

Of the Australian top performers, True Spirit clocked up 56.7 million hours of viewing time globally between January 1 and June 30, which equates to roughly 31.2 million views of the 1 hour 49 minute movie. It was the 242nd most-watched title on the streamer over the period.

Wellmania, which Netflix declined to renew for a second season, clocked up 41.3 million hours and finished in 400th spot. That equates to around 10.32 million people having watched every minute of its eight 30-minute episodes.

By way of comparison, the ABC claims Fisk has been watched by an average of 2 million viewers per episode across its first two seasons in Australia alone. Wellmania’s figures are global.

The release of the report represents the biggest move yet towards audience reporting from the world’s largest streamer, and comes after calls from Hollywood’s writers’ and actors’ guilds during the recent strike for greater transparency from the sector.

At stake is the question of remuneration for success. Agreements were struck recently between workers and the studios/streamers introducing bonuses for titles that hit particular viewing benchmarks on platforms such as Netflix.

Though the agreement requires information to be provided “subject to a confidentiality agreement” to potential profit participants, Sarandos insisted the decision to release such detailed viewing data had not come about specifically in response to the dispute, but rather as a result of Netflix maturing as a company.

“In the earliest days, it … wasn’t really in our interest to be that transparent, because we were building a new business,” he said. “And by not doing public data, there was something creators liked a lot about it too, which is it took a lot of pressure off the overnight ratings model or the weekend box office model.”

However, he conceded, “the unintended consequence of not having more transparent data about our engagement was it created an atmosphere of mistrust over time, with producers and creators and the press, about what was happening on Netflix. So we’ve been on this continuum of opening things up.

“This is probably more information than you need,” Sarandos said of the dataset, which lists almost 5000 titles.

“But I think it creates a better environment for the guilds, for us, for the producers, for creators, and for the press.”

The most-watched title on Netflix in the first half of the year was season one of The Night Agent, which racked up 812 million hours of viewing.

The Jennifer Lopez action thriller The Mother, directed by New Zealander Niki Caro (Whale Rider), was the most-watched film, with just under 250 million hours.

Jennifer Lopez in the action thriller The Mother, which was Netflix’s most viewed movie in the first half of 2023.Credit: Netflix

While Wednesday is the most popular English-language series ever released on Netflix, it finished in fourth spot on the list, simply because it had already been out for two months when the survey period began.

The report shows the power of the long tail in other ways. Licensed content accounts for 45 per cent of viewing time on Netflix, and series such as Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and The Office all feature prominently.

The nine seasons of Suits, the show that first aired in 2011 and in which Meghan Markle starred, collectively accounted for almost 600 million hours of viewing.

Other top Australian or Australian-made titles included: Gymnastics Academy, Heartbreak High, Mako Mermaids, A Perfect Pairing, InBESTigators, Interceptor, Glitch, H20 Just Add Water and Clickbait.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

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