Streaming Ratings, Now Arriving More Quickly: ‘Reacher’ at No. 1, ‘Lanterns’ Debuts on Chart

For the six years Nielsen has been releasing weekly streaming ratings, the charts have had a significant lag time: The numbers released on a given Thursday reflected viewing from four weeks earlier.

As of this week, however, Nielsen is cutting that lag time by more than 60 percent, from 28 days to 11. The charts below are for the week of Aug. 31-Sept. 6. It’s not quite real time, but it’s a much more current snapshot of what people are watching on streaming services than the previous setup.

“This may be the most significant enhancement to Streaming Content Ratings since its launch in 2017,” said Brian Fuhrer, Nielsen’s senior vp product strategy and thought leadership. “As the speed of change across the media landscape increases, providing our clients with more immediate, up-to-date audience data helps them keep pace with the consumer.”

In addition to the sped-up public release of streaming numbers, Nielsen is now also providing its clients with daily, rather than weekly, data on streaming series, as first reported by Vulture. As with linear ratings for broadcast and cable shows, Nielsen won’t publicly offer up daily streaming numbers. But its clients — the networks, studios and streamers — can opt to release some of those figures (presumably when they tell a good story). For instance, the Vulture piece notes, HBO’s Lanterns (138 million viewing minutes) and Paramount+’s Lioness (120 million) were the top two original streaming series on Monday, Sept. 14, after both debuted new episodes the day before.

Lanterns also makes its first appearance in the weekly charts for Aug. 31-Sept. 6, tallying 500 million minutes of watch time for that week. Prime Video’s Reacher (1.25 billion minutes) led the overall rankings and had its fourth consecutive week over 1 billion minutes. The Big Bang Theory (1.07 billion minutes) and Tyler Perry’s Netflix series Beauty in Black (1.06 billion) also got above the billion-minute threshold.

Nielsen also released streaming ratings for Aug. 17-23 and Aug. 24-30 on Thursday. Reacher (1.52 billion minutes) led for Aug. 17-23, and Netflix’s Outer Banks (1.49 billion) climbed to No. 1 for Aug. 24-30 after the premiere of its final season.

Nielsen’s streaming ratings cover viewing on TV sets only and don’t include minutes watched on computers or mobile devices. The ratings only measure U.S. audiences. The top streaming titles for Aug. 31-Sept. 6, 2026, are below.