Netflix Saves You From 160 Hours Of Commercials Each Year

Netflix, the oldest and the world’s most popular streaming service, is saving its subscribers from over 160 hours of commercial time every year, CordCutting reports. While services like Hulu and YouTube have also recently developed ad-free options, Netflix has always been commercial free, which is why some viewers believe that Netflix can eventually completely replace cable.

Netflix recently surpassed the 75 million subscribers mark, with CEO Reed Hastings announcing that its subscribers stream 125 million hours of content every day. Based on these numbers, one can calculate that 125 million hours spread across 75 million subscribers is 1 and 2/3 hours per subscriber per day. Here’s how one can estimate the number of commercial hours saved by Netflix per year:

From Nielsen, we know that a typical hour of cable TV includes 15 minutes, 38 seconds – or 938 seconds – of commercials. Multiply that figure by 1.67 repeating and you get 1,563.3 (also repeating) seconds of commercials per day. That’s 570,616.7 seconds per year, which works out to 158.5 hours. So each subscriber saves him or herself about 160 hours of commercials per year by streaming their content through Netflix.

We know that there are 15 minutes, 38 seconds (or 938 seconds) of commercials in the average cable hour, so we can say that Netflix subscribers worldwide skip a total of 117,250 million seconds – or 32,569,444.4 hours – of TV commercials each and every day.

It must also be noted that in a given hour of viewing, Netflix subscribers don’t just see 15 minutes, 38 seconds fewer of commercials than cable TV subscribers, they also see 15 minutes, 38 seconds more of whatever they’re actually watching.