With 400 million views per month, Xfinity On Demand has grown to become a powerhouse platform providing our customers access to enjoy the latest TV shows, movies, kids series and more with the touch of a button. Over the past few months, TV has grown to become the number one category, generating more than 80 million hours a month of time shifted viewing. With the ability to easily access and watch most of the current top-rated TV series from broadcast and cable networks, many customers are catching up with their favorite shows next day On Demand, and in some cases, instead of using the DVR.
This year, we are on track to exceed 30 billion total views since the On Demand platform launched in 2003. Two years ago we started the Xfinity On Demand Awards, which recognize the most viewed content and talent during the year. We’ve just issued the results for 2012, which you can view here. It’s an interesting snapshot in time of what’s most popular among our Xfinity TV customers around the country.
But as someone who watches how people watch TV, it’s more exciting for me to dig into the data on how customers are consuming media. To help customers catch up and keep up, Xfinity TV introduced even more current content and more ways to watch in the past year. We launched the ability to download TV shows and movies for free, which is incredibly convenient and can save customers money. Customers can now stream 100,000 TV shows and movies across Xfinity On Demand, online at xfinity.com/TV and on-the-go using the Xfinity TV Player app.
Marathon viewing, or binge viewing, entire TV series was a major entertainment trend in 2012. This is not necessarily a new thing – cable networks have been programming TV marathons on their line-up for years, and DVD box sets allowed customers to catch-up on their favorite series. But as the On Demand platform continues to grow, the technology is allowing more and more customers to easily spend hours at a time catching up on their favorite current TV series, perhaps in advance of a season premiere, or simply to participate in water cooler talk. Among the favorite genres our customers love to catch up on are serial dramas. For example, we offer every episode of Seasons 1-8 of Grey’s Anatomy on Xfinity Streampix, and the most recent episodes On Demand. Of all TV series, Grey’s has the most views per viewer in a month, telling us it’s the most binge-watched show in all of our offerings. In fact, in one month in 2012, the average Grey’s viewer racked up an average of 20 episode views! Customers also enjoyed binging on episodes of The Office, Entourage and Army Wives.
Viewing data from Game of Thrones also exemplifies consumers’ catch-up behavior. A feat in itself, the show’s season premiere of Season 2 was the most viewed premiere TV series episode of 2012 On Demand. More remarkably, the very first episode of the series from 2011 had even more views than the 2012 season premiere, suggesting that new and old fans returned to the very beginning to get the show’s backstory before viewing the current season debut. It’s probably no surprise then that Game of Thrones also was the most-viewed premium network TV series of 2012, followed by Dexter and Homeland.
Once fans are hooked to a particular series, we want to make keeping up easy. In 2012, we made being a fan even simpler by adding the download capability to the Xfinity TV Player app so customers can watch content on their apps without an Internet connection. In-line with the serial drama catch-up habit, Homeland was the most downloaded TV series of the content we started with at launch. Among movies, Finding Nemo was the most downloaded title, perhaps highlighting that it’s helpful to have a kids movie on hand available for family travel! We expect to see even more marathon viewing and downloading as we constantly add even more current content to Xfinity On Demand and great library content on Xfinity Streampix.