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Olympics Steal Streaming Spotlight As No Originals Make Nielsen Chart; ‘Prison Break’ Latest Series To Pop On Netflix

katie campione
·3-min read

The Paris Olympics stole the spotlight on streaming in the first week of August, according to Nielsen.

The company’s latest streaming report shows no streaming original titles in the Top 10 for the first time since it began sending out these weekly newsletters in the beginning of 2020. Only two titles, House of the Dragon (considered an HBO and therefore linear/acquired title) and Bluey managed to crack the billion-minute mark at all from July 29 to August 4.

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Earlier this month, NBCUniversal reported that the Paris Olympics generated 23.5B minutes of streaming across all digital platforms, including Peacock, which was putting up some of its best usage days ever during this period. In its report Thursday, Nielsen reiterated that Peacock had an “extraordinarily strong” week.

Even though Peacock only served three days of Olympics programming in July, the streamer’s usage was still boosted to its second highest ever, accounting for 1.5% of all TV usage in the month, Nielsen reported in The Gauge.

All this to say, expect the Olympics to have another outsized impact on the state of streaming in the coming interval as well. It should not be a surprise that, in between tuning into the latest Olympic events, U.S. audiences were also still gravitating toward acquired content, which almost always makes up the majority of the overall list on any given week.

Prison Break is the latest series to get the Netflix treatment, shooting up to No. 5 on the overall list with 758M minutes viewed after moving to the streamer. The Fox series had already been available on Hulu.

Nielsen also speculates that Tom Cruise’s appearances at the Olympics may have influenced the charts in more ways than one. At this point it was already rumored that the movie star would help with the LA28 handover, and he was among the spectators in the crowd, which surely drove interest to the Games.

But, audiences were also gravitating toward his 2018 film Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, which was released on Netflix during this interval and managed 10th place on the overall list with 697M minutes viewed. Nielsen says 38% of the Jack Reacher viewers also watched the Olympics this interval.

As for the streaming originals list, The Boys was still dominating with 662M minutes viewed — just missing the cutoff for the overall chart.

Love Island came in next with 576M minutes viewed. This is a fairly strong showing for the series, considering the finale had aired the week prior. This speaks to the long-tail viewing for Love Island USA, after audiences began to gravitate toward that iteration in mid-July.

The Umbrella Academy also popped back onto the streaming originals list as audiences prepared for Season 4, which debuted on August 8 (which will be represented in next week’s report).

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