Netflix doesn’t release streaming stats for individual shows, but Procera’s analysis of a slice of broadband traffic showed that the second of original series House Of Cards got off to a healthy start when new episodes debuted on February 14.
“The initial day of viewing showed a HUGE uptick from season one,” Cam Cullen, Procera’s VP of global marketing, noted in this blog post, adding that the bandwidth management firm will have more data to share on House Of Cards-related traffic trends after the weekend.
Procera, which began to monitor Netlfix networks with the proper episode identification starting at 8 a.m. on Friday, said 16% of Netflix subscribers on an unidentified U.S.-based cable network streamed at least one episode of House Of Cards that day. That’s up from a mere 2% on a “similar sized network” last year over the entire weekend.
Showing “clear signs of binge watching,” a snapshot of that same U.S. cable network taken at 5:30 p.m. ET by Procera showed that 15.7% of Netflix subscribers had streamed episode 1 of the new series by then, while 16.1% had teed up episode two, and 10.6% had streamed in episode three.
And the traffic spike wasn’t a U.S.-only phenomenon. A Scandinavian broadband network (again, Procera doesn’t identify these by individual ISPs) showed that 6% of Netflix subs watched at least one episode of season two of House Of Cards on Friday.
Cullen said he gobbled up 27 gigabytes of data by streaming all of season two in HD using a PlayStation 4 connected to a broadband connection that maxes out at 20 Mbps and averaged about 7 Mbps during the viewing period.
