Note: This article is a deeper dive into topics covered in the Variety VIP+ report “The Death of Peak TV,” available to subscribers.
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The prevailing wisdom of the TV peak era was not just that content was king, but that content was everything. Put money into original series, release as many high-quality (read: high-budget) titles as possible, and subscribers would surely follow.
That strategy has long since been exposed as a fallacy, of course, with the streaming wars effectively ending in defeat for everyone but Netflix. But new insight into TV’s peak-year ratings is a startling illustration of just how badly those content investments have paid off.
Data obtained by Variety VIP+ from Luminate’s new streaming viewership product shows that in 2022 — a year in which SVOD platforms released a record-breaking 1,000 original series — the vast majority of viewing time was captured by just a handful of those series. Across every major U.S. SVOD service except Netflix, the 20 most-watched TV seasons in 2022 accounted for more than 80% of original series viewing hours.
