It has been quite a while now
since Disney began systematically removing their licensed digital content from
the global streaming juggernaut that is Netflix, in order to build up their own
exclusive streaming service, Disney+. Now the two are pretty much in the thick
of things where the “streaming wars” are concerned, trying to one-up each other
in terms of their respective original content offerings. Disney+ has recently
been riding high on the extremely positive reception of their “Star Wars”
spinoff “The Mandalorian,” which beat some of Netflix’s originals in streaming demand.
But Netflix is firing back with bigger view counts for “The Witcher,” though
the measures used are eyebrow-raising.
According to The Verge, Netflix
is using some form of brinkmanship to inflate the interest being shown for
their exclusive original series “The Witcher,” based on a Polish fantasy book
series-turned-videogame franchise. The streaming giant gave plenty of hype to
their new show, starring Henry Cavill (“Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman”)
during their Q4 2019 earnings report. First, they noted how at least 76 million
Netflix subscribers have watched “The Witcher,” and that interest for the show
grossly dwarfs that of “The Mandalorian” and other streaming platform originals,
as tracked by Google Trends.
The thing is, the statistics
cited by the Netflix for how hot a franchise “The Witcher” is now feels fairly
skewed when one looks a bit deeper. For the views, the 76 million subscribers
who streamed the show were measured in terms of how much of an episode they
watched. Originally tracking for those who watched 70% of one episode, the
measurement that registered the 76M figure was gotten from those subscribers
who choose to watch an episode for a minimum of 2 minutes. That is technically
about as long as a “Witcher” cold-opening sequence.
And for the Google Trends measure
of interest of “The Witcher,” the metrics are also highly in favor of the
Netflix original over the competition. Netflix is available worldwide, or in
more territories in comparison to its competition like Apple TV Plus or
Disney+. Therefore, “The Witcher” charts much higher than the limited-availability
of “The Mandalorian,” which is on a recently-launched platform and has not expanded
to more markets yet. Furthermore, Netflix releases its series on streaming in
batches, whereas Disney+ goes for a weekly episode release like standard TV.
Netflix explained its “2-minute
minimum counts as a whole-episode view” metric as being the same used on
YouTube, BBC iPlayer and page-view measurements on The New York Times website, in that two minutes is long enough to
consider a page-view as intentional. The Google Trends interest measurement is
harder to justify, considering the long-running advantage Netflix has on its
rivals.
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