Study Proves Viewers Use Netflix, Hulu, And Amazon To Watch TOTALLY Different Stuff

In the era of peak TV, you can’t have just one streaming service. A lot of people have more than one, with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime being the top three. But, as research conducted by Hub Entertainment Research has shown, viewers use those services to watch very different things. The results of Hub’s report, which can be seen at Quartz, are illuminating if kind of expected.

To get results, Hub interviewed 1,800 consumers in the United States who watched at least 5 hours of TV a week during December. They found that viewers spent 37% of their time on Netflix watching original series, 39% of their time on Amazon Prime watching movies, and 54% of their time on Hulu watching non-original series. So… that makes a lot of sense. And it confirms a lot of assumptions we’ve (or at least I’ve) made about those three streaming services over the years.

Netflix has doubled down on original programming. That’s evidenced by how many popular shows left the service in 2017 alone, and also by just how many original series they launch every week. We now know that there’s some logic to that move, as viewers now go to Netflix for original content like breakout hits Stranger Things and Ozark.

Conversely Hulu, the streaming service that snatched up nearly every major series that Netflix lost, is popular with people that want to watch other shows. That includes new episodes of currently airing shows (which has long been Hulu’s main draw) or episodes of classic shows (an area that Hulu has quadrupled down on over the last year). Hulu originals only took up 24% of viewer time on the platform, still edging out movies (22%).

In recent years, Amazon has made strides in the feature film department, winning awards and garnering critical praise for Manchester By the Sea and The Big Sick. So obviously, people go to Amazon for movies, and these stats bear that out.

The report also measured how much time consumers spent with different kinds of media. For consumers of all ages, TV (which includes traditional cable and streaming services) was by far the most popular way to spend their time (40%!), followed by movies (15%) and social media and online video sites like Facebook and YouTube (12% each). It’s an entirely different story for younger consumers, aged 18-24. TV watching came in third (19%) , behind gaming (22%) and online video (21%).