Streaming viewership is a contentious issue, when Netflix is the only one of the major platforms that releases data in any sort of official capacity, having recently pivoted away from the 28-day model of households reached in favor of weekly film and television rankings that count total hours streamed.
HBO Max, Disney Plus and Prime Video have never been interested in sharing the cold, hard data with the public, and they’re under no obligation to do so. However, third-party aggregator Samba TV has done a sterling job in filling the gaps, revealing how many televisions equipped with the company’s software have been checking out the latest major on-demand titles.
The latest development is a surprising one, after Samba revealed that 2 million customers in the United States watched acclaimed animation Encanto during the movie’s first weekend as part of the Disney Plus library. That’s significantly higher than the 1.7 million who checked out Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings during the same timeframe, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster spent weeks at the top of the most-watched list.
Shang-Chi made $432 million at the box office compared to Encanto‘s $200 million, while they were both widely acclaimed after landing Rotten Tomatoes scores of 91%, so it’s interesting to see that subscribers favored the latter in terms of three-day views.