Montana has knocked off Wisconsin as the state where residents stream the most Hulu programming, the SVOD and live TV service revealed this week in its annual Reflections on Streaming report.
Other big winners included comedy movies, up 36% as a genre compared with 2016 levels. Paramount’s Daddy’s Home, the Will Farrell-Mark Wahlberg original, streamed 12 million times to top all film titles in 2017. (The studio took the crown in 2016 as well, with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.)
Many of the findings confirm the business model of Hulu, and its current stakeholders: Disney, 21st Century Fox, Comcast/NBCUniversal and Time Warner. While it is investing in originals and had a banner 2017 in that department, winning the Best Drama Emmy for The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu also has stocked its shelves with well-known off-net fare. Many of these long-promoted titles performed well in 2017. Americans streamed more than 107 million hours of South Park in 2017, with the 10th episode of Season 20, “The End of Serialization as We Know It,” ranking as the most watched episode.
Family Guy, Law & Order SVU, Bob’s Burgers and Rick and Morty were also popular titles, the company said. Anyone paying attention to the ratings gap, which started to close slightly this year as Nielsen began measuring SVOD content, will find one stat on The Handmaid’s Tale interesting. As new episodes posted, 66% of viewing occurred during the first three days after they went on the platform in batches overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday.
Streaming of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia jumped 20% over 2016, with The Goldbergs also up 20%, Brooklyn Nine-Nine up 29%, Parks and Recreation gaining 32% percent and Black-ish more than doubling last year’s audience.
Hulu found that women were again the most avid streamers, as in 2016, averaging 232 hours per subscriber and tuning in live sports more than any other live programming.
And speaking of live, among Hulu viewers with a live TV plan, 47% watched both live TV and on-demand content each day, with 57% consumption being live and 43% percent SVOD. Being able to access live and on-demand in the same place (which Hulu began providing last spring) spurs increases of overall viewing by more than 100%.
By state, more viewing per subscriber occurred in Montana in 2017, which took the title from two-time defending champion Wisconsin. In second place was North Dakota, followed by Idaho, Alaska and Wyoming. Wisconsin fell to No. 6.
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