NPD: Movie Franchises, Current Series Top SVOD Rankings

PORT WASHINGTON: According to The NPD Group, big box-office titles, franchise movies and current TV series are the most streamed content on subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services such as Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.

From January through October, the top three ranked TV series streamed on SVOD services were all shows that were still running on TV. The top was Breaking Bad, which has now concluded its run on AMC, followed by How I Met Your Mother, currently airing on CBS, and The Walking Dead, on AMC.

For feature films, in that same time period, the three movies streamed most from SVOD services were The Hunger Games, a movie franchise; The Avengers, also a movie franchise; and The Lorax, a recent SVOD release.

NPD also found that the share of total TV streams demonstrated the popularity of original shows produced solely for SVOD. Over the six weeks following the release of season four of Arrested Development on Netflix, 11 percent of subscribers per week streamed at least one episode; this translates into more than 3 million viewers. House of Cards had 5 percent of subscribers streaming it within weeks of its initial SVOD release, and Hemlock Grove had 4 percent.

“It’s not surprising that big box office hits do well with the SVOD audience,” said Russ Crupnick, the senior VP of industry analysis for The NPD Group. “With The Hunger Games, The Avengers and other franchise titles, there’s the added sweetener of introducing new audiences to the franchises and improving box office receipts.”

“SVOD has been shaking up the home video market, since it was introduced in 2007,” Crupnick continued. “Today, one out of four U.S. consumers who acquired a movie or TV show through subscription, rental or purchase in the first-half of this year did so using SVOD.”