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  Good afternoon from somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. As we approach the end of the year, I just want to thank everyone for reading the newsletter. It’s been an eventful 12 months for the media, from the sale of Paramount and the imminent sale of Warner Bros. to the president’s barrage of attacks. I am going to be taking next week off. I hope you all continue to have a good holiday and see you in 2026. Five things you need to know
The new American TV viewerWe live in an era of asymmetrical information. Technology companies are sitting on more data and information than they know how to use, and yet the average person or business partner has access to very little of it. Talk to any Hollywood producer, agent or lawyer, and they will gripe about having limited information, how much harder it is to measure success and how little they know relative to Netflix or Amazon. They don’t know the exact value of Stranger Things to Netflix, for example. We do have enough information to understand what’s working, what’s not and what’s changing. To that end, we’ve spent the last few weeks looking at a large trove of data from Nielsen to understand what people are watching on TV. Some caveats up top. This isn’t complete viewership data. We are looking at US streaming viewership — and specifically the weeks where shows appeared in the Nielsen top 10 charts. Netflix publishes its own data, which we have analyzed as well, but that doesn’t help us compare the streaming leader to anyone else. Also, Nielsen measures Hollywood content — sorry YouTube — and our data ended in early November, so we don’t have the full 2025. But we have examined years of Nielsen viewing data — enough to offer a thorough look at our evolving entertainment habits. The most-popular TV show of the last five years is...NCIS. The CBS legal procedural just edged out ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. Most of the shows in the top 10 are long-running broadcast programs with hundreds of episodes available — or kids’ programs that your toddler has on repeat. The only original series for adults that make the cut are at the very bottom.  The most-popular original streaming series of the last five years is...Ozark. The crime drama starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney was a huge hit for Netflix. You might be surprised to see that Ozark tops Stranger Things, but remember that Netflix has only released two seasons of Stranger Things since 2020, which is when Nielsen started publishing this streaming data. And the most recent season, the fifth, came out too late to be included. (We’ll have more to say on Stranger Things.) It is worth noting that Netflix accounts for all 10 of these shows.  The most-popular streaming service of the last five years is...YouTube, duh. The Alphabet Inc.-owned streaming service eclipsed Netflix as the most-popular streaming service on TVs a couple years ago and has never looked back. It is now larger than Netflix and Amazon combined. YouTube has spent the last few years building out its audience on TVs. It’s been so successful that Instagram is now following its lead, while Netflix is looking to compete in new categories like video podcasts. Many Hollywood producers are looking to incubate new shows and talent on YouTube, while every major streaming service and brand is talking to top online content creators about potential partnerships. Netflix will use a version of this chart if its deal for Warner Bros. ends up in antitrust litigation.  Free streaming services are growing more quickly than paid onesYouTube has been the fastest-growing network on TV, but it’s not the only one. The rise of YouTube is part of a larger trend — the growth of free, advertising-supported streaming. The Roku Channel is the fastest-growing streaming service after YouTube, and Tubi isn’t far behind. Let’s compare two free services — Tubi and Roku — with the paid services of Comcast and Warner Bros.  They were the same size a couple years ago. Now? Tubi and Roku are almost twice as large. The rise of free services makes sense if you consider the evolution of the audience for streaming. Streaming accounted for 26% of TV viewing when Nielsen’s monthly gauge reports debuted in May 2021. At the time, paid services such as Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ accounted for the majority. Many of streaming services’ earliest users were younger people in wealthier cities. As streaming penetrated almost every corner of US society, it attracted many more price-sensitive viewers — people who are dropping cable or trading broadcast TV for other free options. Paid services have also gotten a lot more expensive. The average price of the major streaming services — even with the cheaper, advertising-supported versions — has eclipsed the cost of cable. If one were to subscribe to the advertising-supported versions of all the major streaming services — including Paramount+, the full Disney bundle, Peacock, Fox One, BET+ and AMC+ — it would near $100. That’s a big reason free services now account for more than 40% of streaming time. Disney hasn’t grown in three yearsI don’t get why this isn’t a bigger story. Disney had the best entry into the streaming space of any traditional entertainment company. It signed up tens of millions of customers in its first month and launched with a huge original hit show. But Disney has lost ground over the last couple of years. The company was once threatening to compete with Netflix for audience. Now, people spend about half as much time with Disney as Netflix. Amazon is nipping at Disney’s heels.  The Amazon numbers include the Channels business — videos from other services watched within the Amazon platform. So it’s not quite apples to apples. But still. The best counter argument I have heard is that Disney is taking its time integrating three apps — Disney+, Hulu and ESPN — into one and wants to reserve a big marketing push for when it’s done. Even if that were true, this process is taking years. Years in which Disney is falling farther behind. It’s not all bad news for Disney. It is still the king when it comes to movies. The most-watched streaming movie of the last five years is...Moana. This helps explain why Disney turned a TV series into a movie sequel and is following that up with a live-action film. Disney+ is home to the majority of the most-popular streaming movies over the last five years. Almost all of these movies are animated and almost all of them debuted in theaters first. The only Netflix original film to make the list is KPop Demon Hunters (more on that later).  Netflix accounts for about two-thirds of streaming hitsThere are plenty of ways to measure Netflix’s heft relative to its peers. It has the most subscribers (300 million-plus) and generates more sales and profit than any other Hollywood streaming service. Nielsen gives us another one. Netflix accounts for the majority of the hit shows. About 66% of the original programs in Nielsen’s top 10 lists hail from Netflix.  It’s not just shows. Consider movies. Disney owns the biggest hits, but people spend a lot more time watching movies on Netflix. More than half of the movies that appeared in Nielsen’s top 10 lists over the last five years were being watched on Netflix.  And in case you forgot our first chart, people still watch a lot of old TV on Netflix. It has a rare ability to turn just about any show into a hit. Reruns that are modest successes on other services become massive ones on Netflix. The Office and Parks and Recreation consistently ranked among the most-watched shows on streaming when they were on Netflix. When Universal moved them over to Peacock, they disappeared from the top 10 lists. The opposite happened with Suits, which only became a top 10 show after it moved to Netflix.  These are the kinds of charts Paramount will use when making the case that Netflix buying Warner Bros. is anti-competitive. But Netflix’s lead is slippingNetflix’s share of streaming viewership — and streaming hits — has actually gone down over time.  Don’t get me wrong, Netflix still accounts for the majority of the biggest hits. But it no longer accounts for all of them. Every major streaming service lands shows in the top 10 on a regular basis. Netflix’s overall share of streaming viewership has slipped below 20%. That is one of the reasons it wants to add a major studio, as well as HBO. The most-watched show of 2025...Bluey. The Australian kids’ show obliterated everything but Grey’s Anatomy. It was the most-watched show on streaming last year as well. Licensing Grey’s Anatomy more than a decade ago was one of the smartest things Netflix has ever done.  A strong showing for Paramount+ with another kids’ classic, SpongeBob SquarePants, while Hulu gets on the board with Bob’s Burgers. It’s pretty crazy that streaming services haven’t produced many new kids’ hits or animated hits when reruns of those genres dominate every year. Absent from this list is CoComelon, which used to be the most-watched kids’ show on streaming. It was the third most-popular show on all of streaming in 2022 and top five in 2023. But that was the same year that Bluey supplanted it. While CoComelon is still huge on YouTube, it’s showing signs of fatigue on streaming. It will be interesting to see if it fades more (or rebounds) when it moves to Disney+. Keep in mind that we didn’t measure the full year, so that is one reason Bluey is down.  The most-watched original streaming show of 2025 is...Squid Game. The final installments of the Netflix thriller delivered a huge audience in the US, the only show in a foreign language to sniff the top of the charts. Stranger Things will be tops by the year-end data. It delivered the biggest opening week of any show in streaming history. Stranger Things would place eighth on this list from just one week of viewing for four of the season’s eight episodes. How crazy is that? Anyway, Netflix has a majority of the top original shows, but isn’t alone. Amazon released two (Reacher, The Summer I Turned Pretty) while Peacock (Love Island) and Apple (Severance) both have one.  The data one above should concern Hollywood. None of these shows are new series. Three of them — Squid Game, The Summer I Turned Pretty and You — are ending. This is the first time in the last five years, at least, that none of the 10 shows were new.  This is actually even worse if you consider that 2023 was impacted by the Hollywood labor strikes. Returning shows like Stranger Things and The White Lotus would also be top 10 shows if we included them, so there’s nothing new in the top 12. Apple is making progress — but is still tinyApple TV attracts a fraction of the audience of even third-tier streaming services like Peacock and Paramount+. It doesn’t appear in the public versions of Nielsen’s monthly gauge charts and accounts for less than 1% of the top 10 shows that appear on the four weekly Nielsen charts over the last five years. It is starting to pick up some momentum for its original series, but still lags behind everyone else. HBO Max is at the bottom because HBO originals count as acquired titles under the Nielsen math. The White Lotus was actually one of the top 10 original streaming shows from past year.  The most-watched movie on streaming this year was...KPop Demon Hunters, duh. It was more popular than the next three biggest movies combined. It is the biggest original movie in streaming history.  If you remember our list of the most-popular movies on streaming of the last five years, it consisted largely of kids’ titles that are viewed over and over again. The list looks a little different if you examine within a given year. Kids’ movies still gather at the top, but there are more original films — four Netflix originals cracked the list. You also see a little more for adults with The Accountant 2, Wicked and Back in Action. To put KPop Demon Hunters in perspective, consider how it compares with the most-popular Netflix original movies ever.  It is more than twice as popular as the next biggest, Glass Onion. My 2025 favoritesIn the spirit of my weekly playlist, I wanted to share my top five books, movies, albums and TV shows of the year. I am including a movie and a book from 2024 that I consumed in 2025. Deal with it. Books
Movies
Apologies to One Battle After Another, The Materialists and It Was Just An Accident. I am still eager to see: No Other Choice and Sentimental Value. TV shows
Apologies to. Shrinking, Nobody Wants This and Tires. Documentaries/Series
Yes, I need to see some docs that aren’t about pop culture. Albums
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