A Warner Bros. exec breaks down the decision to keep ‘Friends’ on Netflix and the data behind it

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Warner Bros. is considering pulling popular TV shows like "Seinfeld" and "Friends" from other streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, as it readies its own rival streaming platform for later this year.
Netflix is still introducing the 1990s sitcom, "Friends," to new, young viewers, data from Nielsen shows.
The media company will have to weigh the value of building the "Friends" brand through platforms like Netflix, versus the show’s potential to attract people to its upcoming service.
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People who watch "Friends" on Netflix aren’t like other "Friends" fans.

The series captures a very different US audience on the streaming-video service than it does on cable channels like Nick At Nite, TBS, and Paramount Network, Nielsen found. Fans of the show on Netflix tend to be young, and some may be discovering 1990s sitcom for the first time.

Netflix drew the smallest audience for the series during the month of September 2018, when Nielsen analyzed the viewership for "Friends." The series pulled in an average of 5.5 million viewers on Netflix, compared 15.7 million on Nick At Nite, where the show also aired.

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But the "Friends" viewers on Netflix were younger than the viewers on the cable networks, an executive at Warner Bros. told Business Insider. The median age for "Friends" viewers on Netflix was in the mid-20s, compared to mid-30s on Nick At Nite and mid-40s on TBS and Paramount.

"You have this really young audience on Netflix that may be discovering that show for the very first time," the executive said. "You’re bringing in a whole new generation of viewers … It builds the brand and the show continues to have life."

In 2018, "Friends" was the second-most-watched series among Netflix’s US viewers, with people spending 32.6 million minutes watching the series, or roughly 62 million years, the Nielsen data also show.

The research firm found very little overlap in the US audiences who watched "Friends" on Netflix and cable networks including Nick At Nite, TBS, and Paramount Network. Netflix had about 600,000 "Friends" viewers in common with viewers of the show on Nick At Nite and TBS, and 300,000 in common with the Paramount Network, during the month of September. The cable networks themselves, meanwhile, had millions of viewers in common during the period.

"The Netflix audience was almost like a brand new audience," said the Warner Bros. executive. "That’s something, as a studio, that we play very close attention to. We don’t want to put something on Netflix that’s going to destroy the audience that’s on Turner or on Nick At Nite. We want everybody to win."

Nielsen presented the "Friends" viewership data at a press event in New York on May 7. The data was an example of a study that Warner Bros., which owns the rights to "Friends," used when analyzing licensing for the series, Brian Fuhrer, SVP of product leadership, said at the event. Warner Bros. is a client of Nielsen’s. The studio allowed Nielsen to share the data to show how companies like Warner Bros. value their shows and compare audiences across platforms.

The debate over bringing TV repeats in-house

Netflix is reportedly paying up to $100 million for the exclusive rights to stream "Friends" in 2019. Later this year, parent company WarnerMedia plans to launch its own streaming service. It is reviewing every piece of content in its library to determine which series and movies to put on the platform. That includes "Friends," which Warner Bros. could decide to remove from Netflix to put it on its own platform, or put it on both platforms.

"If you think everything from ‘Friends,’ ‘Seinfeld,’ you go to ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ all of this TV production is also owned by Warner Bros.," Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, said at JPMorgan conference on Tuesday. "And we will be bringing a lot of these media rights, licensing rights back to ourselves to put on our own [streaming-video-on-demand] product."

Legacy media brands that are launching their own Netflix rivals, including WarnerMedia, Disney, and Comcast’s NBCUniversal, are weighing how much they can sell their top shows, like "Friends," to other streaming services for, as they decide whether to keep their library content for their own services or license them to others.

Companies like CBS are looking at how much they can license their shows to other platform for compared to the cost of producing the shows, as well as the number of new subscribers the shows could potentially attract, Joe Ianniello, CEO of CBS, said on his company’s earnings call in May.

WarnerMedia will also have to think about how the audience for it own streaming service will compare to Netflix’s, based on the comments from the Warner Bros. executive. If the audiences are different enough, as they were from "Friends" viewers on Netflix and the cable networks, there could be room for shows like "Friends" and "Seinfeld" on both platforms.

When Warner Bros. first starting selling "Friends," it introduced the show to new viewers through local TV networks. It found more fans on cable TV, and, now, streaming services like Netflix.

"Ten years from now, who knows where the new platforms will be?" the Warner Bros. executive said. "But hopefully we’ll have a place for a new generation of fans to bring into ‘Friends.’"

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