Netflix saves subscribers 160 total hours of commercials per year


Anyone who skips commercials with a DVR knows an hour long commercial program goes by quicker than watching in real time. With a DVR, we can watch an hour show + a half hour show in nearly the time it takes to watch an hour show live. With TiVo's new Skip Mode, it's even better.

Cord Cutting took a look at what that means for all of Netflix subscribers who opt for paid streaming TV vs conventional cable.

Stephen Lovely for Cord Cutting:

First of all, we know that Netflix recently passed the 75 million subscriber mark. And, at around the same time, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that Netflix subscribers stream 125 million hours of content every day. So, with some simple arithmetic, we can calculate that 125 million hours spread across 75 million subscribers is 1 and 2/3 hours per subscriber per day.

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.

So, that's 160 hours per hear across all subscribers. Or about 6.6 days.