Netflix has come a long way in the last few years. It wasn't even that long ago that the business was based on sending DVDs to your door, before the idea of streaming content online ever crossed our minds, but now we're so used to watching Netflix when we get home for the evening that the slightest loading time has us up in arms.
The company is continuing to grow, as now it has expanded into financing its own original series and even movies. Its first series,
House of Cards, was a huge hit, and that was the only the start of the new venture. In 2016 alone they had released 126 original series or films, which is more than any other network or cable channel.
As of October 2017 the service has over a hundred million subscribers worldwide, with around half of that number originating from the United States. That's plenty of users to survey and analyse, meaning there's less need for the ratings system regular television uses to judge how well each show is doing. With all that data comes the opportunity to see the stranger side of our viewing habits, as Netflix has shared with us all this month.
Netflix released various statistics about their audience's habits, revealing that there are some who watch things, let's say, in an unusual way...
In fact, the company revealed that one user watched Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King a stunning 361 times in 2017. Bear in mind that this closer to the fantasy trilogy is nearly three and a half hours long, and this particular user still has a few weeks to increase that number.
On top of that they revealed that another user watched Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl 365 days in a row somehow, while another watched The Bee Movie 357 times. You might assume it's on repeat for their kids, but somehow I don't think any kid would have chosen that movie over any other.
Netflix also pointed out that 53 people watched A Christmas Prince every day for the last 18 days, outing them in a hilarious fashion on Twitter.
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The rest of the data revealed that we collectively watched 140 million hours of programmes each day, which ends up being more than a billion hours a week. Canadian users were the fastest country in terms of binging shows, but Mexico have the most Netflix subscribers. Struggling to catch up is Antarctica, who only has one user (who apparently loves Shameless).
The average member watched around 60 movies this year (more than once a week sounds about right for me), and the most popular day of the year to watch was on January 1.
Why could that be? Oh right - it's probably because most of us are nursing
hangovers, eating takeaways and putting off those New Year's resolutions for a few days while we recover from the biggest night out of the year.
