Legal streams for 2011 TV hits

Last week, I looked at the avail­abil­ity of 2011 movie box office win­ners as legal inter­net streams. The results seem to incense Net­flix sup­port­ers, who pointed out that the com­par­i­son was unfair because Net­flix was more focused on TV fares. This week, I turn my atten­tion to avail­abil­ity of pop­u­lar TV shows as inter­net on-demand streams.

Approach

As I did a year ago, I pulled the data from Deadline.com’s Broad­cast series ranker and cleaned it up. I took out every live and real­ity TV shows as the archival value of such show is lim­ited since they are pri­mar­ily mar­keted as “events” and, as such, loose most of their value to the viewer after the ini­tial broadcast.

Where part of one of the sea­sons was avail­able, I gave the ser­vice a par­tial avail­abil­ity. Where sea­sons prior to the 2010–2011 years were avail­able, I did not give credit if the 2010–2011 sea­son had no avail­abil­ity because I was focus­ing the effort on avail­abil­ity of last year’s shows.

From a ser­vice stand­point, I focused on ser­vices that allowed for stream­ing to most internet-enabled tele­vi­sion. This meant that Net­flix and Hulu were the main sub­scrip­tion based offer­ings and Ama­zon on-demand and iTunes were listed as pay-per-view services.

The list

With­out fur­ther ado, here’s the list of top 2011 TV shows avail­able for stream­ing on the internet:

While it is fun to check if your favorite show is avail­able or not, the real inter­est­ing trend­ing data only comes when you re-group the infor­ma­tion. For this pur­pose, I looked at two dif­fer­ent sets of data: first, I looked at whether all the episodes of the 2010–2011 sea­son were avail­able for a given series. Then I re-ran my research, giv­ing full credit to the ser­vice for hav­ing “some” episodes from that season.

The results were as follows:

As one would expect, the pay-per-view ser­vices are doing bet­ter than the sub­scrip­tion based ones but what is sur­pris­ing is how lit­tle con­tent is actu­ally avail­able on the subscription-based ser­vices: Hulu only offers some episodes of half of the most pop­u­lar shows, while Net­flix barely has any offer­ings, clock­ing in with just above a third of the shows hav­ing some kind of stream.

When try­ing to access full sea­sons, the data is even worse, as Net­flix offers full sea­sons on only 9 (or 18%) of the top 50 shows, while Hulu gives you access to the 2010–2011 sea­son for 18 shows (or 36%). The amus­ing thing is that Hulu appears to give you access to as many full sea­sons as Net­flix has as par­tial ones. The data shows that if you want access to pop­u­lar TV shows via sub­scrip­tion, you’re bet­ter off going with Hulu than you are going with Netflix.

What seems to be hurt­ing those ser­vices is the fact that CBS, one of the large TV net­works has decided to go it alone when it comes to their own shows and show them on their own sites instead of mak­ing them avail­able to stream aggregators.

Another inter­est­ing thing is that Net­flix seems to pick up can­celled shows more read­ily than any other ser­vice. In my research, I found that if a show had been can­celled over the last year, it was more likely to be avail­able on Net­flix than on any of the other services.

On the pay-per-view side, Ama­zon and iTunes have now reached par­ity, as both ser­vice offer 43 (or 86%) of the shows on either per-episode or per-season fees. Their pric­ing seems to be roughly the same, with shows aver­age between $.99 and $3.99 per episodes and full TV sea­sons passes going for $20.99 to $40.99. I would not be sur­prised if next year, we saw those ser­vices hav­ing the full set of shows avail­able for instant streaming.

Break­ing it down

Look­ing at the dis­tri­b­u­tion, one might won­der how each of the ser­vices fares on sub-sets of the over­all group. Fur­ther­more, in terms of get­ting a bet­ter sense of trends, if is use­ful to over­lay this with last year’s data and see whether progress has been made:

Over­all, it looks like top 10 shows are less avail­able onall-you-can-eat  subscription-based ser­vices this year than they were last year, while there is an increase in avail­abil­ity on pay-per-view services.

Net­flix con­tin­ues to trail other ser­vices in terms of mak­ing full sea­sons avail­able and it seems it is a gap that will not nar­row any time soon as Hulu, Ama­zon, and iTunes con­tinue to aggres­sively grow their cat­a­logs. In fact, the big story in this graph may be the big push Ama­zon is mak­ing in adding new titles to its stream­ing library. It has now matched Apple’s iTunes store in terms of offer­ing, clos­ing the gap it had last year.

When look­ing at par­tial avail­abil­ity, we are still see­ing some differences:

Here, Net­flix appears to have actu­ally list some ground when it comes to the top 10 list, while all the other play­ers have made sub­stan­tial progress. This may point to another weak­ness for Net­flix mov­ing for­ward. Also of note is that while Apple used to be the go-to source for all TV series, Ama­zon has closed the gap in the last year, estab­lish­ing itself as a strong sec­ond player in the market.

Con­clu­sion

Many peo­ple look to online TV streams as the key to increas­ing the num­ber of peo­ple cut­ting the cord from their cable com­pa­nies and mov­ing to internet-only offer­ings. This year’s data seems to indi­cate that it is now pos­si­ble to do so but that the costs asso­ci­ated with such a strat­egy may not nec­es­sar­ily rep­re­sent a huge sav­ing for peo­ple who con­sume a lot of TV content.

The great­est amount of avail­able con­tent in terms of legal online streams can be found on pay-per-view ser­vices and subscription-based ser­vices like Net­flix and Hulu still have some ways to go before pro­vid­ing a TV-like selec­tion (this may explain why both of them are start­ing to turn fur­ther in the direc­tion of pro­duc­ing their own con­tent). How­ever, view­ers who watch only a few select show may be able to get this con­tent from ser­vices like Ama­zon and Apple iTunes for a fee.

Peo­ple watch­ing this space should pay closer atten­tion to Amazon’s aggres­sive push in this arena. As the com­pany con­tin­ues to expand its dig­i­tal offer­ings, it seems to have ear­marked video as one of the areas in which it is will­ing to go big and it has qui­etly grown its cat­a­log over the last year.

Mean­while, while Hol­ly­wood is try­ing to push for laws against online piracy (things like SOPA and PIPA), cre­at­ing fric­tions with the tech com­mu­nity in the process, maybe it should focus on mak­ing con­tent avail­able through legal chan­nels first, before com­plain­ing that peo­ple are steal­ing con­tent. One of the rea­son peo­ple may be drive to piracy is the lack of avail­abil­ity of the con­tent through legal means. Fill that gap, and you will see sub­stan­tially less piracy of con­tent hap­pen­ing on the internet.

Next week, I’ll take you through last year’s box office win­ners and how avail­able those are. There are more sur­prises there, I promise; so stay tuned.