Are 'Friends' & 'The Office' Really The Most-Watched Shows On Netflix? Maybe.

Yesterday's piece in the Wall Street Journal about Netflix and its most-watched television shows received lots of attention, since it argued that the streaming service might be soon losing some of the shows most popular with its subscribers. Written by Joe Flint and Amol Sharma, the piece "Netflix Fights to Keep Its Most Watched Shows: 'Friends' and 'The Office'" was based on ratings information supplied by Nielsen. It noted that three of its biggest programming suppliers -- AT&T Inc.’s WarnerMedia,  Walt Disney Co. and Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal -- are all in the process of launching their own streaming services. Disney has already pulled most of its content from Netflix and the rest will disappear when current contracts expire. So, the piece argues, what will be the impact on Netflix if its other major subscribers make the same decision and pull their very popular content?

The three companies launching new streaming services have created TV shows and movies that make up nearly 40% of the viewing minutes on Netflix, according to data compiled and analyzed for The Wall Street Journal by Nielsen.

Although Netflix has burnished its brand with a flood of original programs such as “Stranger Things” and “The Crown”—and spends most of its time on quarterly earnings calls discussing that content—nonoriginal “library programming” made up 72% of the minutes people spent watching Netflix as of October, according to the Nielsen data. That means reruns, and most of them are made by Netflix’s rivals.

Eight of the 10 shows people spent the most time watching on Netflix in the U.S. last year were reruns, including old hits such as NBCUniversal’s “Parks and Recreation,” WarnerMedia’s "Friends" and Disney’s "Grey’s Anatomy," the data show.

Few subjects are prone to more aggregated bad takes than Netflix and this piece inspired dozens of flawed pieces in the past 24 hours. All of them making increasingly aggressive predictions about the streaming future of your favorite television shows on Netflix.

Unfortunately, there are two problems with this coverage-one factual, one more philosophical.

The factual one is that despite the claims of the article's headline, there is no way to know if "Friends" and "The Office" are really the most-watched shows on Netflix. According to Nielsen, the data only covers viewers in the United States. Which is a big problem when about 60 percent of Netflix's current subscriber base is outside the U.S. So while the data is interesting, it's no more definitive than those viewer numbers from Jumpshot that Recode used on its much-disputed piece last year.

It's likely those two shows generate the most minutes of viewing for Netflix in the United States. But that's not what the headline or the article stated. Netflix gives no outside indication of what shows might be the most watched in any territory, and there is no way to know if those two shows are as popular in Brazil as they are in Boston. And since the article didn't offer any sort of caveat about the data that I could find, entertainment outlets that are primarily based in the United States just went with the clickworthy headline and extrapolated all sorts of scenarios.

All of this is a shame, because the majority of the article is well researched deep dive into some of the less flashy factors at play in the decisions surrounding content and where it should stream. Netflix makes an argument that a most-watched series may not be as valuable to the company as one that drives subscriber growth. But while the company can track that internally, there is no way to track that from the outside.

The article also discusses some of the interesting contractual considerations if shows such as "The Office" are pulled from Netflix.  If the "profit participants" of these shows don’t get a fair deal, they might have grounds for legal action against studios. So WarnerMedia can't just pull "Friends" from Netflix from its own service without ensuring the show's profit participants will make the same money they would if it remained on Netflix or moved to Hulu. That constraint is one that seldom gets discussed in stories about Netflix, even though it's going to be one of the leading factors in determining the streaming future of shows such as "The Office."

So the bottom line is that while there's no way to know if "The Office" and "Friends" are the most-watched television shows on Netflix, they are likely the most-watched shows with American subscribers to the service. Which is an interesting factoid. But it's not clear how important a factor that is in a story about a global streaming service and whether or not it will retain global rights to American-produced television shows.

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