One of the perks of watching television content on Netflix, as opposed to cable television or Hulu, is the lack of commercials. Not only does the absence of commercials mean you can view content uninterrupted, but it also saves time.
"We know one of the benefits of an ecosystem like Netflix is its lack of advertising," Howard Shimmel, a chief research officer at Time Warner, told Bloomberg last year. "Consumers are being trained there are places they can go to avoid ads."
How much time do people save? CordCutting.com did the calculations and found that Netflix subscribers save themselves a whopping 158.5 hours a year. This is more than 6.5 days worth of commercials.
The streaming-data site used Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ quote that subscribers watch 125 million hours per day to calculate that 75 million subscribers each stream an average of 1 ⅔ hours a day. The site then took Nielsen data, which disclosed that an hour of cable television has 15 minutes and 38 seconds of commercials, to come up with the final number of how much time Netflix saves its users.
“On top of all of this, it’s worth remembering that our calculations are showing how many hours of ads Netflix viewers replace with show and movie content. That is, our numbers show how many commercials Netflix viewers skip per hour of viewing, not per hour of content. 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.”
Last year, Exstreamist ran their own calculations on how much time Netflix saves its subscribers and found users saved 130 hours of commercials a year.
