Twice a year, Netflix let the world peek behind the curtain. Now the curtain closes a little more, dropping to just once.
Starting 2027, the streaming giant trades transparency for focus, one report a year instead of two.
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Netflix will stop releasing its viewership data reports every six months. The company confirmed the change on Thursday alongside its second quarter 2026 earnings report. Starting in 2027, Netflix will publish just one viewership report a year, arriving in the first quarter.
The latest edition of the “What We Watched” report, covering January through June 2026, was the final one released under the old schedule. Netflix has followed this twice a year pattern since December 2023.
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Netflix explained the shift in its second quarter shareholder letter. The company wants to separate the viewership report from its quarterly earnings report, keeping investor focus on revenue and operating profit.
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The letter also touched on how Netflix defines success for its shows. Company leaders wrote that engagement is not only about the number of view hours, but also about the quality and variety of what Netflix offers.
Despite ending the twice yearly data dump, Netflix said some numbers will still be shared. The company will continue publishing title by title data and total view hours, along with its weekly Top 10 lists for movies and series across more than 90 countries.
The decision follows recent reporting by Bloomberg. That reporting claimed Netflix original series often see viewership drop sharply in their second seasons.
Netflix pushed back on that claim during its earnings call. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is not seeing any real change in second season viewing compared to first seasons, when looking at the full slate of shows.
The report released Thursday covered the first half of 2026. It named the top film and top series for the period.
“War Machine” was the most watched film on Netflix during the first six months of the year. “His & Hers,” a limited series, was the top TV title for the same period.
Other shows also performed well. Season four of Bridgerton finished second among series with 100.2 million views, though it led in total hours watched with 889.8 million, since its episodes ran twice as long as those of “His & Hers.”
A new series called “I Will Find You” landed in third place for views despite premiering less than two weeks before the reporting period ended. The final season of Stranger Things came in fourth.
Netflix also shared total viewing figures for the first half of the year. Netflix users worldwide spent about 97.7 billion hours watching series and films on the platform, a 2 percent increase from the 95.2 billion hours logged in the same period last year.
Netflix did not include specific numbers for its video podcast viewership in the report. The company said this is because the format is still new to the platform, having launched earlier this year.
Even without exact figures, Netflix pointed to some internal trends. The company said its internal data shows encouraging engagement with podcasts, mostly during daytime hours and on mobile devices. In the first half of 2026, Netflix members streamed 757 million hours of content grouped under “Other Shows.”
The viewership change was announced alongside Netflix’s second quarter financial results. The company posted mixed results against Wall Street expectations.
Netflix reported earnings per share of $0.80, beating estimates of $0.79. However, revenue came in at $12.56 billion narrowly missing forecasts.
Stock reacted negatively to results. Netflix shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading following the earnings announcement.
Profit numbers still showed growth compared to last year. Net income reached $3.40 billion, up from $3.13 billion during the same quarter last year.
Looking ahead, Netflix adjusted its guidance slightly. The company narrowed its full year 2026 revenue forecast to a range of $51 billion to $51.4 billion, tightened from an earlier range of $50.7 billion to $51.7 billion. Netflix expects third quarter revenue to rise by 12 percent and described its full year outlook as consistent with earlier projections.
Netflix had already raised subscription prices across all its plans earlier in the year.
Netflix began publishing viewership data in December 2023. The first report covered 18,000 titles, representing 99 percent of the platform’s catalog, and detailed viewing hours for the first six months of that year. That earlier move followed years of Netflix keeping such figures private, and came after Hollywood guilds secured transparency provisions in labor negotiations with studios.
Netflix remains an outlier among streaming services in this respect. The company is the only major streamer that consistently shares nearly all of its viewership data with the public.
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