The first full week of July was a big one for streaming with seven titles surpassing 1B minutes watched in the U.S., per Nielsen‘s latest report.
For the first time ever, Love Island USA led the pack from July 7 to 13 with 1.9B minutes watched. Not only is that the highest weekly total ever for the series, it’s also the first time that a Peacock series has ever reached the No. 1 overall spot.
This is quite a feat for the series, which had struggled to find its footing in its first five seasons. That all changed with last summer’s Season 6, catapulting the series into the cultural zeitgeist the way that its UK predecessor had already been able to do.
Since Nielsen doesn’t report viewing per season, this includes any and all viewing of previous seasons during this week as well, so it’s hard to say exactly how the audiences stack up season-over-season. Both Nielsen and NBCUniversal have already acknowledged that Season 7 saw unprecedented viewership for the USA iteration, so while we may not know exactly how much of this week’s viewership went to the most recent season, it’s safe to say it was likely the majority.
Per Nielsen, Love Island USA generated an impressive 8.8B minutes of viewing over the course of its six-week run, 54% of which came from adults 18-34 — making it the No. 1 streaming title among adults under 35 by a significant margin. One more note: the Season 7 finale aired on July 13, meaning it’s likely the series will stick around the Nielsen charts for at least another week as longtail viewing for the finale comes in.
Second place during this interval went to the Canadian series Sullivan’s Crossing, which landed on Netflix on July 8. The streamer’s own data has already illustrated this CW title’s huge popularity, but Nielsen says it generated 1.35B minutes viewed in the first week. In third place was Squid Game with 1.25B minutes viewed, down from No. 1 overall, where it stood for the previous two weeks.
Prime Video is also seeing success with Bosch spinoff Ballard, which put up a strong 1.03B minutes viewed in its first week on the service. That’s for all 10 episodes, landing the series at No. 7 on the overall list. Per Nielsen, adults over 50 accounted for 82% of its total viewing.
This marked a very strong week for streaming originals, meaning that there are some other high performers that didn’t really get a shot at making the overall list, like The Sandman with 642M minutes viewed and The Waterfront with 543M. Peacock also saw a solid performance for Poker Face with 312M minutes viewed upon the release of the Season 2 finale.
On the film side of things, Madea’s Destination Wedding came in first, while Kpop Demon Hunters took second. Zombies 4: Rise of the Vampires, which was at No. 7, drew 274M minutes viewed in its release week.
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