Netflix Streams Over 90 Million Hours of Content a Day

That’s over 3.75 million days, or 10,000 years of streaming movies and TV shows, in case you were wondering.

A recent study of 2,000 Netflix subscribers revealed that we’re all spending a little over 1.5 hours a day on the streaming service, a massive increase from a few years ago.

netflix streaming statsMultiplying this by the current subscriber numbers (recently announced around 63 million) and it’s easy to see why Netflix takes up over 37% of internet usage during peak times. 

Netflix is sending out an average of over 90 million hours of movies and TV to us all on a daily basis. While Netflix doesn’t release any specific data on the quality averages of each stream, one hour of standard definition video is approximately 1GB of data and a high definition stream is almost 3GB of data, so on the low end, they’re streaming 93TB a day or over 279TB  depending on video quality, not even taking into account the 4K streaming options they have on certain shows.

For comparison, however, the average American is watching 4.7 hours of TV a day. So while Netflix is certainly grabbing more and more of our entertainment attention, continual threat for traditional television advertising, as the subscription service offers no way for third parties to advertise to its customers (and it sure as hell doesn’t seem like Netflix subscribers would stand for that).

Interestingly, digital video isn’t necessarily zero-sum overtaking traditional television viewership either, as a recent report detailed out that while digital video is certainly increasing, and traditional TV is declining, it’s not a rapid takeover. Instead digital is supplementing our video watching habits, causing us all to spend more time watching video.

This “1.5 hours a day” only seems like it will increase moving forward, though, and that should be a scary thought for traditional TV.