Of Course Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Wants Streaming Rivals to Be ‘Transparent’ About Viewing Data — It Would Show His Massive Lead
variety.comTodd Spangler NY Digital Editor It’s good to be the king. Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, sits atop an industry-leading paid subscriber count of nearly 280 million worldwide.
This week, Sarandos spoke at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York and previewed Netflix’s latest gigantic data dump on Thursday — its biannual “Engagement Report” showing views and total viewing hours for 99% of the content on the platform.
In aggregate, Netflix customers streamed 94 billion hours of programming in the first half of 2024. That’s up just a hair from 93 billion a year earlier, but it’s still up. “I don’t think we could be any more transparent than this,” Sarandos said at the conference. “I’m hoping that the other folks in the business will follow suit.” Well, no kidding.
Sarandos would love for Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, Max or any other streamer to put numbers out revealing virtually all viewing of their users — because it would lay bare just how wide the gulf is between Netflix and anyone else.
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