The NFL Breaks Records; Streaming Awards Contenders Do Not
The Streaming Ratings Report for 24-Nov-2025 & 1-Dec-2025
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
Remember when I wondered if the holiday film bump had died?
Stranger Things definitely proved that Thanksgiving weekend can drive MASSIVE numbers. (See last issue!) So did the Macy’s Day Parade on NBC, which I also covered last issue. And football, of course, also dominated the TV airwaves, as it does every Thanksgiving, setting records.
But we didn’t see any new movies break out over Thanksgiving weekend. We’ll see how that fares into Christmas week, but I’m not holding my breath.
That’s what we’re talking about today, films and football. I’ll look at Netflix’s latest prestige film play and latest foreign language import to see if they succeeded in early December. All that, plus the latest KPop Demon Hunters vs. Encantobattle, the rare standup comedian who can make the Nielsen viewership charts, a slew of straight-to-streaming Christmas romcoms, some terrific data from Antenna, all flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
Let’s start with football, where both linear and streaming games joined the record-smashing parade.
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of November 24th to December 7th.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Sports - Football Also Breaks Streaming Records…With a Big Caveat
Football does big numbers every year, and those big numbers seem to be getting bigger. I say “seem” because Nielsen changed their methodology this broadcast season, moving to a “big data” panel, and that seems to have boosted the numbers anywhere from 5 to 15%. Maybe more; it’s tough to say. This comes on the heels of adding “out of home” viewing in 2020, which also boosted numbers by a similar amount.
Still, even just comparing things as they are, football is usually one of the top shows on streaming week-in and week-out. Then it gets even bigger on Thanksgiving.
During the two weeks we’re looking at today, the Dallas Cowboys, the NFL’s biggest team in terms of popularity, played two games. During the thirteenth week of the NFL season—the game played on 4-Dec—they played the Detroit Lions on Thursday Night Football, and that game became the most streamed Thursday Night Football game to date. Nielsen put it at 19.4 million average viewers, which equates to 49.7 million streaming hours in my calculations. (As a reminder, I put total hours to put it in context with other streaming shows and films.)
That game and the “Black Friday” game offset Prime Video’s typical late-season slide. On Black Friday this year, Amazon’s Prime Video saw 16.3 million average viewers, or 41.8 million hours of viewing.
However, as I often point out, streaming football viewership never matches streaming plus linear viewership (meaning games that air on both broadcast television and streaming services), especially on Thanksgiving. Here are those monster numbers for contrast, using total hours (not just streaming) for all the games:
This chart really shows the impact of “big data” on these viewership numbers. The Kansas City Chiefs versus Dallas Cowboys was actually the most-watched NFL regular season game ever, with 57.2 million average viewers, or 171.6 million hours total.
So records, records and more records broken. But…
…the caveat for all these numbers is that Nielsen’s numbers are higher for everything, partially due to a methodology change. Starting this year, Nielsen is adding data from the streamers themselves to the mix in what they call “Big Data Plus”, and the numbers are all 5% to 15% higher than they were in previous years.
In past years, I’d actually put the week-by-week numbers next to each other in this chart:
But not this year. To bring you behind the data curtain, I didn’t update that chart for 2025, because putting Big Data Plus numbers next to the older numbers violates my “apples-to-apples” rule. But I actually think I have a solution. Here are the 2025 numbers, but put on the end with a line clearly marking the change:
Still, data change or not, football is massive. Just utterly massive in America.
Film - The Limitations of Foreign and Prestige Films
You know, even Netflix kinda cleared out of the way for football and Stranger Things the week of Thanksgiving, not releasing any big films. (They had a few Christmas titles, see below.)
The week after, though, Netflix released both a prestige Oscar contender and a sequel to one of their more successful foreign titles. Both did “fine”, but aren’t smash hits.