Do you remember when, if a show was on at 8pm on a Friday, you made damn sure you watched it? Or, outside that, dusted off an E240 tape and set a timer? Now it is just content! Content everywhere! Considering we are completely spoilt for sheer choice these days, I find it amusing (and frustrating) just how little I have on rotation this summer. Sure, the winter months are usually more full, with big shows dropping to take advantage of long, cold evenings, but my viewing schedule right now is bare, no matter how many streaming options I have.
Now that I have finished Welcome To Wrexham and Clarkson’s Farm for this year, I basically have Stick on Apple TV+, and that is about it.
With half the year behind us now, streamers are busy looking back to see what their big hitters were. They are. They are helped in this information from Bloomberg as they prepare for their annual Screen Time conference, derived from the Nielsen data.
Netflix is still the king of streamers, but its lead over its rivals has slipped. In 2021, they had 80% of the most-watched shows. Now it is down to 50%.
Squid Game captured the top spot with its third season, with 15.1 billion minutes watched in the first half of 2025. In second place was the third season of Reacher on Amazon, with 13.3 billion minutes watched. Third was back to Netflix for The Night Agent, the second season of which delivered 12.2 billion minutes watched.
Surprisingly, Ginny and Georgia also scored big for Netflix with 10.2 billion minutes watched in fourth. Apple TV’s Severance was in fifth with a second season of 9.3 billion minutes watched.
The rest of the top 10 were:
1923 (8.5 billion)
The Pitt (8.2 billion)
The Handmaid’s Tale (8.2 billion)
You (8.1 billion)
Landman (7.8 billion)
The article does make a distinction between “streaming originals” and shows that were cable and network-produced shows distributed via streaming. These included The Last Of Us and The White Lotus, which would clearly have made the top ten if they were eligible under Nielsen rules.
