Amid the anticipated dropping of its third and final season, Apple TV Plus series Ted Lasso captured nearly 17 million minutes of viewer engagement in the U.S. last year, more than any other original show or movie in domestic subscription streaming, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen's data -- limited to sampling of TV screen viewing in the U.S. market -- does not reveal how many addressable homes Apple TV Plus has. For that matter, Apple has never released a subscriber figure for its four-year-old Apple TV Plus service.
Apple did reveal during its third-quarter earnings conference call back in August that it now has more than 1 billion subscribers across its digital services portfolio. Apple told showbiz union IATSE back in September 2021 that Apple TV Plus had fewer than 20 million paid subscribers.
When ranking the major SVOD services, most TMT analysts and trade pubs hazard a guess for TV Plus of well under 30 million paid members.
But given Nielsen's just-released performance metrics, those figures look way too low.
So how many subscribers does TV Plus have?
Nielsen's weekly streaming rankings still garner regular coverage from the major showbiz trades, but there has been, since their beginnings three years ago, a major distortion in the methodology, which is major differences in platform scale.
According to Netflix's latest shareholder letter, released last week, the service has 77.32 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, for more than any competitor. This is the major reason why Netflix's films and series fill the rankings on Nielsen's weekly streaming charts. They just have way more addressable viewers.
Netflix's No. 1 show last year (by its own global tally) was Shawn Ryan's The Night Agent. According to Nielsen, The Night Agent finished second behind Ted Lasso on its 2023 original show rankings with 2.5 million fewer engagement minutes than the Apple show.
Runtimes and episode counts factor in here, with 10 episodes of The Night Agent running an average of 45 minutes each vs. 30 total episodes of Ted Lasso typically around half an hour in length.
But the water-cooler fervor of Ted Lasso's final sign-off last May aside, we don't think the show could generate these kinds of engagement numbers if Apple TV Plus didn't have at least, say, 40 million or more addressable viewers in the U.S.
Then again ... Nielsen's sustained credibility as a measurer of video usage continues to confound us. For instance, as the final five episodes of Ted Lasso generated, by Nielsen's own account, huge viewing engagement last May, Apple TV Plus wasn't even accounted for on Nielsen's monthly viewership tracker, "The Gauge," for the month of May 2023.
Apple is still offering three free months of TV Plus to purchasers of Macbooks, iPhones and other Apple gadgets.
Back in October, Apple upped the price of its SVOD service to $9.99 a month.
Apple and Ted Lasso aside, Nielsen also said that 13-year-old off-USA Network series Suits was the most watched show in U.S. subscription streaming last year, breaking the engagement record set by The Office.
Nielsen also said that overall streaming engagement was up 21% vs. 2022.
