Netflix just delivered its biggest Christmas-holiday audience ever, powered by the platform’s debut into live NFL game action and the return of its record-breaking Korean series Squid Game.
Avoiding the technical difficulties that marred its live streamed November boxing event, Netflix live-streamed AFC matchups between the Baltimore Ravens and Houston Texans, and later, the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers on Dec. 25, across 218 countries.
Bolstering the latter contest with a halftime performance from Beyoncé, the two games averaged 26.5 million viewers just in the U.S., and also ranked in the top 10 in more than 60 countries. That’s well above the typical punching weight for NFL regular-season games, which averaged just under 18 million U.S. viewers airing mostly on traditional broadcast and cable platforms in 2023.
The matchups finished as Netflix’s Nos. 1 and 2 English-language TV shows of the week on Netflix’s weekly Global Top 10 rankings, with the Ravens-vs.-Texans delivering 14.4 million account views and 42.8 million hours streamed, and the Chiefs-vs.-Steelers generating 14.3 million views and 41.2 million hours streamed.
Back in May, Netflix agreed to pay the NFL a reported $450 million for the rights to Christmas-Day twin matchups for three years. And the league — which now covets streaming distribution partnerships — seemed to get exactly what it wanted. According to Nielsen data, the two games delivered the NFL an unduplicated audience of 65 million viewers just in the U.S. across its myriad of platforms, which included CBS local TV stations in markets local to the participating teams, as well as out-of-home viewing and NFL+.
The global TV audience for pro football – where viewership for each game averaged about 30 million global AMA - was more than matched by the season 2 debut of Netflix’s most popular show ever, Squid Game, with seven new episodes of the Korean dystopian sci-fi drama dropping on Dec. 26 and yielding a massive 68 million account views and 487 million streaming hours in their first four days on the platform.
The performance already ranks Squid Game: S2 as the seventh most popular non-English-language TV show ever in just its first week. That list, of course, is topped by season 1 of the show, which debuted back in September 2021. Season 1 is also the all-time top-ranked program of any kind on Netflix.
And the hits still kept coming over the holidays for Netflix, which also saw action movie Carry-On, starring Jason Bateman and in its third week on the platform, draw a big 34.9 million account views and 69.8 million streaming hours for the week of December 23-29. In its second week on Netflix, historical war drama The Six Triple Eight starring Kerry Washington finished second among English-language film titles with 23.3 million account views and 50.4 million hours streamed.
Oh, and among English-language TV shows, season 6 of Virgin River delivered a solid 9.2 million account views and 76.1 million streaming hours.
For context: The end-of-year holidays have traditionally been a big viewing period for Netflix. But consider the same week last year, when part 2 of filmmaker Zach Snyder’s disappointing space fantasy-drama Rebel Moon ranked as Netflix’s No. 1 title for the week, delivering just 34 million account views and 77 million total streaming hours.