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Streamer Report Cards, Part I: The Tech Lords

The Boys is one of the few Prime Video series to chart on Nielsen, and its Season 3 finale is one of only three Amazon shows to amass more than 1 billion minutes streamed in a week.
‘The Boys’ is one of the few Prime Video series to chart on Nielsen, and its Season 3 finale is one of only three Amazon shows to amass more than 1 billion minutes streamed in a week. Photo: Jasper Savage/Amazon
Julia Alexander
April 16, 2023

Earlier this week, I was chatting with a television executive when the conversation segued to a frequent lament: the opacity of the industry in its evolution from linear to streaming. Not only is data still proprietary, but there is no consensus on which metrics matter, and how they matter to each service, given the particularities of users, libraries, and strategies. 

The confusion plays out in all kinds of ways, but this TV executive was complaining about a practical challenge: when shopping a new project to a streamer, there’s essentially no benchmark for success or failure. Every streamer has its own greenlight process, its own strategy for increasing subscribers and lowering churn, and virtually nobody wants to share the numbers that justify these decisions.