In the first half of 2025, over 95 billion hours of Netflix programming was viewed worldwide, up just 1% year over year. The most-watched show was the four-part drama Adolescence, set and produced in the United Kingdom, with 145 million views and over 555 million hours of viewing. That is across a very large number of titles, with no single title producing more than 1% of total viewing. The animated pre-school programme Peppa Pig is doing surprisingly well, given that it is not available globally, with 269 million hours of viewing across 7 series.
More than a third of all viewing came from non-English language titles, and 10 of the 25 most-watched series were non-English, with Squid Game producing 231 million views across all three seasons and a total of 1.63 billion hours of viewing.
The most-watched movie was the American action comedy Back in Action with 165 million views and 313 million hours viewed.
Netflix has released viewing figures for over 16,000 titles, including movies, although they are rather rounded numbers, with over 5,000 of them in the 100,000 views bucket.
As Ted Sarandos, now co-chief executive of Netflix, noted, even a top title is only going to drive about 1% of total viewing. “So you need a lot more than just a big hit every once in a while. It’s not about the single hit, it’s about a steady drumbeat of shows and films and soon enough, games, that our members really love and continue to expect from us.”
Acknowledging that the Netflix share of total television viewing has been fairly flat in the United States, he said the goal continues to be to grow share over the long term, but it has been able to maintain its share in the presence of a growing number of online video services.
Referring to the recent partnership with TF1 in France, Greg Peters, the other co-chief executive, said the fundamental purpose is to expand the entertainment offering. “We want to provide more content, more variety, more quality,” he said. “This is just another mechanism to expand that offering.”
“We wanted our first partner to be in a big territory. We wanted to pick the leading local programmer,” he said.
Netflix reported what it called health member growth in its quarterly numbers, “ahead of forecast”, but the company no longer regularly reports subscriber numbers, preferring to talk about revenue. That was up to over $11 billion for the second quarter, up 15.9% year on year, through more members, higher prices, and increased advertising revenue, producing free cash flow of $2.27 billion.
Netflix has rolled out its own advertising technology stack across all its advertising markets, offering personalised targeting, with the promise of the introduction of interactivity in the second half of the year.
On live programming, Ted Sarandos said: “sports are a subcomponent of our live strategy but our live strategy goes beyond sports alone”. He said live is a relatively small part of the total content spend, with about 200 billion hours of viewing, but it has importance for subscriber acquisition and retention. He said that most of the live events have been mainly focussed on the United States, but there are plans to continue to invest and grow live capabilities for around the world in the years ahead.
Greg Peters said that the new user interface that has been rolled out to a number of televisions has resulted in better than expected performance. “Bluntly, the previous experience was designed for the Netflix of 10 years ago, and the business has evolved considerably since then,” he said. “Helping out members understand that there’s a really good reason for them to launch Netflix and tune in at 7:00pm on a Friday night versus just showing up whenever they were free and wanted to be entertained. That’s a totally different job, and we really need a different use interface to do that job well.”
“It’s worth remembering there’s about 80% of total TV view share that neither Netflix or YouTube are winning right now. We think that represents a huge opportunity for which we are competing aggressively, and we aim to grow our share.”