Last week, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry debut on Apple TV Plus. The documentary becomes the “biggest hit title for young adults that Apple has had so far over its entire film and TV series,” according to Deadlinewhich draws a record 33 percent new viewers to the service. ‘
Sounds impressive, right? That would be if Apple provided any form of context for statements such as the “biggest hit” and “record-breaking” subscriber. Instead, let us wonder:
- How many subscribers does Apple TV Plus currently have?
- How many people actually watched Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry?
- How many of these new subscribers have free Apple TV Plus trial plans?
- How do viewer numbers and subscriber additions compare to every other title?
Without any of this context, 10 million people would have seen it Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry or 10,000 people. I was one of them! But there is a clear difference between the two figures. If the documentary is released in theaters or launched on a network like MTV, there will be real statistics in a pre-current world. Weekly box office reports and Nielsen breaks exist to give the public insight into how well a film or TV show performs.
It’s not just Apple either – with stronger pressure on streaming, there’s no reason for companies to release figures. As more original series and movies premiere on streaming services, and as more movies are taken out of theaters early to switch to a streaming service, the idea of what is considered an official hit becomes much more difficult to detect. Here are some examples for the past few months:
- Hulu’s Happiest season was the “most watched movie in all purchased and Hulu Original movies” during the opening weekend.
- Only a few weeks before Happiest season, Hulu’s Run set the record for “the most watched movie ever on Hulu during the opening weekend.”
- HBO Max’s The little things According to WarnerMedia CEO Andy Forssell, he ‘shot to first place’ quickly during the opening weekend.
At the moment, there is no reason for the companies to disclose numbers. It is a choice of a will strategy. A movie or TV show is doing amazingly well, and that’s a good reason for a company like Disney or Netflix to broadcast an explosion. (Video game publishers use a similar number strategy.) Netflix notes that 99 million households have watched accounts at least two minutes of Withdrawal within the first four weeks of its release. That sounds really good! Unfortunately, this is the first time that viewership is a streaming service. But how many people have finished watching Withdrawal compared to how many people might have thrown it and after five minutes decided to just watch The Witcher again or do something completely different?
None of this is important for streaming companies. Netflix has more than 203 million subscribers and is growing. Disney Plus, Hulu, HBO Max and Peacock are also growing based on quarterly earnings. Apple has never announced how many subscribers Apple TV Plus has, but third-party analysts have repeatedly pointed out that a significant portion of its subscriber base uses free trial periods.
The box office does not dictate quality, but the global cultural phenomena do. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, says NPR‘They look like a huge event that for many people is an option to say that’ I participated in something that many other people also participated in ‘, and this can be described as part of a group. ” In the case of Avengers: Endgame, brought people together to make it the most successful film of all time, tracking daily box office numbers.
Last year, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, told analysts the company makes the equivalent of billion-dollar movies. The billion-dollar movie – a new Star Wars, Fast and furious, Marvel, or DC title – speaks to the power of a cultural phenomenon, of a true pop culture moment. It’s a sign of something that is celebrated and experienced with millions of other people around the world – people who went to a movie and probably went through the whole thing. As Bilge Ebiri wrote on Vulture, with public data about people who watched an entire movie on Netflix or Hulu or HBO Max, ‘tells us not only whether a movie or a show made it for the right people, but also whether the people stuck to it have or not – maybe even, snag, enjoyed it. “
Since the future of theaters is so uncertain, it will only become a bigger problem being transferred to streaming platforms. Even less data will be made available about what parts people are watching. As a result, more viewing experiences will feel increasingly isolating. People like to take part in popular culture, to watch the hit that everyone is watching, but figuring out what is a hit and what is not, becomes much harder to determine.