EW reports that, according to Symphony and NBC, the top Netflix show during the September to December period was Jessica Jones, which according to their estimate had 4.8 million viewers. Other Netflix series released during that period include the drug war saga Narcos, which Symphony pegged at 3.2 million viewers, and the comedy Master of None, which they estimated at 3.9 million viewers.
Without knowing more about Symphony’s methods it is impossible to know how accurate the company’s estimates of the audience size for Netflix’s fall 2015 releases (Do they include the folks who stream Netflix through their BD players, Roku, Smart TVs’, or other non-phone downloading devices?). If the numbers are accurate, the audiences for these Netflix shows, although solid by cable standards, certainly don’t match those of the top network shows, (even on a network is as lame as NBC, shows like The Voice {9 million} and Blindspot {10.1 million} draw many more eyeballs), though Netflix doesn’t depend on ratings for revenue.
It is a measure of the fear that the network honchos have for the audience-stealing potential of streaming services that NBC authorized its analytics guy to reveal their “intelligence” on the size of the Netflix audience to the Television Critics Association in what has to be seen as an attempt to deflate the critical hype that many of Netflix’s series have received from a critical fraternity that has been anything but kind to Network offerings like The Biggest Loser and American Ninja Warrior.
