minutes watched

Streaming sites evidently measure how much you like something by a metric called “minutes viewed” which really ought to be “cumulative minutes viewed” (if this was advanced stats for sports, it would be called CMV) because it is a measure of all the minutes that any client watched the show. Which is… weird, like, as a measurement of whether or not someone liked a thing. It doesn’t tell us how many people watched it. It doesn’t tell us how many people who started watching, watched all the way to the end. It doesn’t tell us much at all other than, “this content was on the screen for a total of this many minutes during the reporting period”, and that is the problem.

The business doesn’t care if a show is good or bad, only that it is content on the screen, because “the screen” is a zero-sum game; the majority only watch one thing at a time, one screen at a time.

This all comes up because the numbers reported by Luminate for 2024 show that the divisive and cancelled Star Wars show, The Acolyte was the second most watched show on Disney+. But what else does it tell us? Not much at all. Because CMV is a context-free counting statistic, which is the least advanced kind of statistic. It’s on par with hits in baseball or yards gained in football, except that in both of those cases we know that hits and yards gained are representative in some way (that isn’t measured well) of the ability difference between the offense and the defense. With CMV, we can’t say something intelligent like, “viewers chose to watch this show for 87% of the time that it is possible to watch anything” because we don’t even know how many minutes were possible, so we can’t calculate the percentage.

And when we don’t report how many minutes the show was, we can’t even derive an approximate measure of how many people stuck with a series all the way through. The Acolyte series is 305 minutes long. This show was on screen long enough for about 8.85 million full series plays (FSP). Disney+ clearly knows what the actual FSP statistic is, but they, along with the rest of the streaming industry, choose not to share that data. There is also, presumably, a chart in the Disney+ business offices that dictates the CMV/$ required for a show to be considered successful enough to even have a conversation about renewal. I have no idea what that number is, but based on the widely circulated $230 cost number, the CMV/$ is 11.73; one dollar of budget got you less than 12 minutes of viewership.

Doing my own research1 leads me to this: The Amazon Plus series Fallout, another genre piece with a similar target viewer, had a CMV of 7.9 billion and a budget of $153 million, yielding a CMV/$ of 51.96.

Compared to Fallout, The Acolyte is an economic failure. But it also wasn’t particularly well liked by critics compared to Fallout. The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer aggregates critics and produces an “-out-of-ten” rating. Fallout scored an 8.00, The Acolyte scored a 6.90.

showCMVseries lengthFSPbudgetcost/minuteCVS/$Tomatometercost / Tomato
Fallout7.95 B473 min16.81 M$153 M$323,46751.968.00$19.1 M
The Acolyte2.67 B305 min8.85 M$230 M$754,09811.736.90$33.3 M
  1. All of the minutes viewed data comes from the Luminate 2024 Year-End Film & TV Report. It requires you trade your email address for access. The series length comes by looking up the length of each episode on IMDB and adding them up. The budget numbers are as reported in industry trade journals, and the Tomatometer scores are from Rotten Tomato ↩︎

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