Streaming media giant Netflix announced that their customers watched over 1 Billion Hours of content last month.
This increase was partly due to the ever increasing speeds of broadband internet services, making it easier for people to watch online content. In addition to these faster broadband services, more and more people now have the use of devices that mean they can watch the Netflix subscription service.
38 viewing hours per subscriber
The 1 Billion hours works out to something close to an average of 38 hours watched for each subscriber, nearly 10 hours per week. These figures for June were a significant rise against the ones recorded back in December, when the average was 28 hours for each subscriber.
The advent of Apple & Android Smart-phones, plus of course the likes of many different tablets, have meant that peoples thirst for watching streaming content has never ever been greater.
Netflix are keen to acknowledge that it is not just this technology that has resulted in a massive boost in viewing figures, the company’s claim that they have worked extremely hard on bringing better, more high profile movies and TV shows to their platform.
This comes as very good news as Netflix attempts to wean people away from a DVD rental service, citing costs as a major reason behind the move to stop supplying its customers with the disc format. Netflix believe that at some point in the near future, the DVD medium will become defunct as it is replaced with different forms of technology.
The company have been trying to gain more and more new movies in the last couple of years, spending tens of millions of dollars trying to keep their catalogue as up to date as possible. A move that is seen as quite sensible given the large number of alternative streaming services, many just waiting in the wings to try to take advantage of any unhappy Netflix customers.
The markets sure took to Netflix breaking the 1 Billion hour mark, as stocks in the company saw a nice rise, up by about $4 closing out on $72; however this is a still a mighty long way off of their all high point of over $300 last year. It would seem that they could do nothing wrong last year, up until the point when they announced a huge price hike and the splitting of their DVD & streaming services; a move that was very quickly abandoned when more than 30 per cent of their customer base told them exactly what they could do with their service.
Lets hope that this time around Netflix don’t face the same kind of backlash from it’s customer base, other wise they could find themselves in some very serious trouble.
……….
