Netflix’s third headline-grabbing installment of original content hasn’t received the best reviews, though it’s clear that everyone and anyone has probably already watched a few, if not all of the 15 episodes. The week following the release of the show saw Netflix stock dropping 6 points in what has since been considered an overreaction, presumably due to a negative New York Times review. Bad reviews won’t stop fans from watching the show, after all.
Although Netflix hasn’t released any stats as to how many subs streamed the show over the holiday weekend, others have noted jumps in traffic on the Sunday and Monday following the release of the series. Santa Rosa, California-based Sonic.Net said it saw a 40% jump in Internet use on Sunday and Monday. ‘Typically we see normal or slightly reduced Internet traffic on a holiday weekend, but the surge in broadband use on Sunday and Monday was substantial,’ Sonic.net said in a blogpost.
Procera, a company that helps service providers monitor their network, has a blog post this week outlining the traffic jumps it witnessed on the networks it monitors.
Highlights include one unnamed DSL network had 36% of devices streaming at least one episode of ‘Arrested Development’ on Sunday. That’s three times what was measured for ‘House of Cards.’
Another unnamed cable TV network saw Netflix peak volume on Sunday jump 10% over the previous Sunday. The number of subs accessing Netflix overall for that day jumped 8% as well.
On a University network, ‘Arrested Development’ accounted for 10% of Netflix traffic on Sunday. 10% of ‘Arrested Development’ viewers made it to episode 15 by Monday, just one day after the show was released.
Gaming consoles Xbox and PS3 generated the most traffic for viewing ‘Arrested Development’ on Netflix, indicating that a lot of viewers watched the show on the TV set, not a laptop or tablet. There was also significant activity on file sharing and download sites, indicating that some viewers who don’t subscribe to Netflix were still looking for ways to watch the show.
‘It seems as if the launch was a success by our metrics, especially when comparing to the subscriber counts to the ‘House Of Cards,” Cam Cullen, VP of global marketing at Netflix, said in the blog post. The series has received mostly negative reviews from the critics, though super fans seem to be happy with the fourth season.
New York Times columnist and television critic Mike Hale boldly declared the Internet had killed the show. ‘The actual execution was carried out by the producers of the show’s fourth season,’ Hale wrote, referring to Netflix.
His complaints seemed to center around the format of storytelling, and that the plot development of the show was’ arrested (wink wink) in a way that made watching it at times painful for poor Hale. The episodes all span the same time period, but include different perspectives.
Hale also complained that the episodes averaged around 30 minutes, instead of the ‘tight and bright’ 21 minutes. For fans, of course, those extra nine-plus minutes were welcome, and we’re betting casual viewers probably weren’t complaining, either.
While the New York Times TV critic was more than happy to survey the show through a painfully traditional TV lens, he didn’t seem interested to acknowledge that ‘Arrested Development’ isn’t a ‘TV show’ anymore, and so doesn’t need to fit into the traditional, linear TV narrative standards.