One additional record for ‘Stranger Things’ is not all that surprising given the others it has previously broken at the start of its fourth season. But the Netflix series has now passed a significant milestone and broken the Nielsen streaming record.
According to Nielsen, ‘Stranger Things’ racked up 7.2 billion minutes of viewing time for the week of May 30-June 5, the biggest weekly total for any streaming programme since weekly rankings were introduced almost two years ago, an ANI dispatch quoted The Hollywood Reporter as saying.
Additionally, it has the highest two-week total of any streaming programme. Season 4 of ‘Stranger Things’ got 5.14 billion minutes of viewership for the week of May 23-29, for a two-week total of 12.34 billion minutes.
No streaming show had ever before, as measured by Nielsen, clocked six billion minutes in a single week, much less seven billion. Prior to ‘Stranger Things’, only ‘Tiger King’ (twice) and ‘Ozark’ in the spring of 2020 during pandemic lockdowns had surpassed five billion minutes.
Nielsen includes all seasons of a show when calculating its streaming rankings, although it’s likely that the seven episodes of season four that debuted on May 27 accounted for the great majority of the 7.2 billion minutes, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. More than 75 per cent of the 5.14 billion minutes of the show during the week of May 23-29, according to the rating service, were from season 4.
Another report by cbr.com stated Stranger Things 4 Volume 2 was so popular that it caused Netflix’s servers to crash upon its July 1 release date, making the site temporarily unavailable.