On Amazon Prime Video, the Wheel of Time debuted with resounding success. The fantasy series based on Robert Jordan’s best-selling books earned more than a billion minutes of viewing time in the week following its premiere (Nov. 15-21).
The first three episodes of “The Expanse” were released by Amazon Prime Video on Nov. 19. According to Nielsen, The Wheel of Time‘s 1.16 billion minutes of viewing time are the most for any original series on Prime Video since Hunters in February 2020 (before the rating service began publishing weekly streaming rankings).
The only other Prime original to top a billion minutes in a given week was The Boys, which had 1.06 billion viewing minutes for the week of Sept. 7-13, 2020, since the weekly rankings began 15 months ago.
The first three episodes of “The Wheel of Time” have a combined duration of 169 minutes, with an average viewership in the United States of just under 6.9 million people.
With the release of Tiger King 2 on Nov. 17, Netflix’s Tiger King re-entered the top 10. The show has two seasons and over 685 million minutes of viewing in the United States, placing it second among originals.
The canceled Cowboy Bebop had a modest debut, with 421 million minutes of watch time. The top 10 acquired series chart for the first time includes a show on several platforms: The Thundermans, which streams on Netflix and Hulu, is one of them.
It was the seventh most-watched imported program with 359 million minutes of viewing time among all acquired series.
Nielsen’s streaming ratings are only based on viewing on TV sets, not a computer or mobile device usage.
The rankings are only focused on US audiences and don’t include viewers in other countries, while the list currently comprises Apple TV+, Disney+ (which has yet to premiere), Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video.