The news that The Office and Friends will leave Netflix in the next couple of years meant that a number of news stories about the moves highlighted the massive amounts of time users of the service spent watching them.
Netflix users streamed a whopping 52 billion-plus minutes of The Office in 2018, according to Nielsen figures, and 32.6 billion minutes of Friends. (Nielsen’s figures, huge as they are, are probably somewhat low, as Nielsen’s SVOD content ratings only measure viewing on TV sets, not other devices.)
Those are nearly inconceivable amounts of time (more on that in a moment) — and also not even close to being the most-consumed properties on television in the past year.
Simply put, in a country with a very large population like the United States, where TVs are present in nearly every household, the capacity to consume television content is just about limitless.
Here’s more reality
So not only are people watching more (STREAMING AND DOWNLOADING) but that means audience attention to traditional broadcast media can only be falling. Quickly.
The future may bring an end to 24 hour media since everyone will have read the news or downloaded a show hours before it is on air.