Here’s a ‘House of Cards’ season 2 viewership claim … at least so far

There’s no disputing that “House of Cards” is a popular series, but what has made it a fairly-difficult one to discuss sometimes on CarterMatt is that we love number-crunching, and Netflix has not exactly made it possible to do that. They do not publicly release viewing figures, which is a nice little way that they have gotten around the Nielsen system thanks to the internet. Therefore, they can spin the show as a hit, and there is no other cross-comparison out there to confirm or deny that. (Then again, there probably would not need to be a whole lot of spinning in this case.)

Well, there are some new figures that are out there today about the show’s success, and they are indeed interesting when it comes to seeing just how fervent some viewers of this show are. Per data from Procera Networks, which compiles based on bandwidth usage from internet providers, around 2% of the Netflix subscriber base, or around 670,000 people, binge-watched the entire second season in one weekend. That basically means that you had people watching four or more hours of this a day in order to get to the end of the 13 episodes. That’s certainly intense, no?

We imagine that when you look at the data for the past seven days, that figure is significantly higher. We know that there are some watching an episode a day, and others with extreme patience watching once a week to have some sort of similar-to-broadcast model for themselves. In the end, the real point here is that there are probably millions who are picking this show, which probably does make a show like “Homeland” or “Boardwalk Empire” a perfect broadcast comparable. We have not seen any evidence that this show has the same hit potential as a “Game of Thrones” or “The Walking Dead,” but it doesn’t need to. Its presence at this point may be even larger than “Mad Men,” though it is difficult to say.

In the end, the most important thing is that Netflix has already greenlit a third season, so there is more “House of Cards” on the way in 2015.

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Photo: Netflix