Stunning Nielsen study says Stranger Things and Encanto were streamed a lot in 2022

Viewers were much more interested in not talking about Bruno than they were in The Gray Man

By Sam Barsanti | January 26, 2023 | 5:30pm

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Stunning Nielsen study says Stranger Things and Encanto were streamed a lot in 2022

Stranger Things (Netflix), Encanto (Disney) Image: The A.V. Club

In the last few years, Netflix has decided to be more open about how many people are watching stuff on its streaming service, with the catch always being that any numbers reported by Netflix should be taken with an enormous grain of salt—because it is 100 percent in Netflix’s best interest to tell everyone that a new show or movie is very, very popular. That’s always true for every outlet putting out content, but when you’re the one telling people how successful the thing you made is, it’s a good idea for everybody else to be a little cautious.

So, despite using arcane methods of gathering data, the people at Nielsen are (probably) (a little) more trustworthy on the subject. If Netflix says that Stranger Things is popular, you don’t have to buy it. If Nielsen tells you that Stranger Things is popular… you can maybe buy it. And, having just released its ranking of the most-streamed movies and TV shows in 2022 (via The Hollywood Reporter), Nielsen says that Stranger Things happens to be very popular.

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Nielsen ranks this stuff by “minutes viewed,” which naturally weights the list in favor of longer and more long-running programming, but either way, it says that Stranger Things was watched for a whopping 52 billion minutes last year. That’s more than 10 billion more minutes than the second most-streamed show, NCIS, which was just a hair ahead of breakneck-paced baby show Cocomelon. That’s including all shows in movies, even ones that were just acquired by a streaming service but originally aired on a regular network.

If you just count streaming originals, Netflix has 13 of the top 15, with Ozark surprisingly landing at number two and Prime Video’s The Boys beating The Rings Of Power by more than a full billion—though THR points out that The Boys has been on for longer and therefore has more seasons, so someone watching all of that show will spend more hours on it than someone watching all of Rings.

One actual surprise comes in the list of most-streaming movies, with Disney’s Encanto more than doubling the number of minutes that the second-place movie (Turning Red) got. Sing 2, which is on Netflix, came in third, handily beating all of the streaming services high-profile original films. The Adam Project, Don’t Look Up, and The Gray Man are all further down the list, and though none of those were necessarily designed to compete for the same audience as Encanto, Nielsen does say they were all watched for 20 billion fewer minutes than the film that gave us “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”

But, again, all of this should be taken with some salt, even if it’s not quite as much salt as if Netflix had been the one bragging about all of this.