I’ve been a Netflix subscriber on and off again since the very beginning. When they began to offer unlimited streaming, I was all over that. I could watch any move I wanted and it was glorious. Now I find myself moving away from the movies and more towards TV shows. It turns out that I’m not alone.
A Nielsen study from today has found that the number of people using Netflix to watch TV shows has gone up eight percent to 19 percent in 2012. That’s still nothing compared to the 47 percent of respondents who use Netflix to watch movies, but that number is actually down from 2011’s 53 percent.
Netflix is becoming a TV powerhouse thanks to their tireless efforts to gain the rights to many of our favorite TV shows. I rarely ever watch TV during the first showing because I’m usually too busy with something else. Netflix lets me watch all of Parks and Recreation in one sitting compared to waiting a week for each new episode. Being able to sit back and watch all the episodes in a row without commercials is definitely a major selling point.
Another big boom for Netflix TV viewing is the company’s creation of new original content. While I haven’t really checked out much of their current original programming like Lillehammer, I think I speak for everybody when I say I’m super excited for the return of Arrested Development later this year.
Interestingly enough, the amount of people who watch movies and TV content equally didn’t budge much over the past year. It declined from 36 percent to 35 percent, but it seems that a large section of Netflix viewers are using the service to its full potential. You can expect to see the numbers of TV viewers on Netflix to increase when the service drops all 10 episodes of the new season of Arrested Development. If it doesn’t, people are using Netflix in all the wrong ways.