Netf lix fails to make it into top 50 shows chart

... but that was before The Crown returned

NETFLIX has failed to break into the 50 most watched shows in the first week it was included in official television ratings.

Yesterday, the official TV audience measurement body Barb released its weekly list of most viewed programmes, covering the seven days between October 31 and November 6.

The list was topped by the launch of I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! with 12.3million, followed by Strictly Come Dancing, with the Saturday episode of the dance show getting 9.9million, while the results show got 8.8million. The 50th programme was an episode of ITV Evening News, which pulled in three million viewers.

Other shows among the most watched in Barb’s rankings were The Great British Bake Off on Channel 4, which pulled in 7.4million viewers, BBC1’s SAS Rogue Heroes (5.6million), ITV’s Coronation Street (5.5million) and BBC1 show Have I Got News for You (5.3million).

There were no shows from any of the streaming giants on the list, although the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi has appeared on it before.

Netflix joined the official figures on November 1. But the new season of The Crown – one of the streaming company’s biggest shows – was not included in the latest top 50 because it wasn’t launched until November 9. Figures released last week showed 1.1million watched the first episode of the new series on the day it came out, and a total of 2.2million watched the episode in its first four days, less than the number who tuned into the 50th most-watched programme.

Figures for the first day Netflix was measured, November 1, revealed the most watched episode that day was the fifth part of The Watcher, its thriller about a married couple being harassed by a stalker, which had 120,918 ‘views’.

A Netflix source pointed out that the service did not have any big launches in the week Barb released figures for.

Other shows in the top 20 included Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel on BBC1, ITV1’s Emmerdale, Channel 4’s Gogglebox and BBC1’s Top Gear.

For broadcast channels, Barb measures ‘consolidated seven- day viewing figures with pre-broadcast viewing and viewing on tablets, PCs and smartphones included’.

But ‘ subscription video on demand’ figures for services such as Netflix are understood to be calculated by dividing total viewer minutes by a show’s duration to give the number of viewers. However, they only include viewing on TV sets.