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    “Red Notice,” “Squid Game” top Netflix hours-watched metric

    By SHOOTUpdated:No Comments941 Views
    From left, cast members Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds arrive at the Los Angeles premiere of "Red Notice" at L.A. Live on Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

    By Jake Coyle, Film Writer

    NEW YORK (AP) --

    Netflix on Tuesday rolled out a new website that measures its most-viewed films and series by the amount of hours users spend watching them. The results? People are watching "Squid Game" and the new action-adventure film "Red Notice" maybe even more than you would have guessed. 

    According to the streaming service's new metric, Rawson Marshall Thurber's "Red Notice," starring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds, has been watched for 148.7 million hours globally since it debuted Nov. 12 on Netflix. In the past week, the most popular series was season three of "Narcos: Mexico," with 50.3 million hours viewed. 

    The first season of "Squid Game" ranks as Netflix's most-watched show or film ever, with 1.6 billion hours viewed.

    Every Tuesday, Netflix will update the site "Top10 on Netflix" with the top 10 series and films on the streaming service. Until now, Netflix has been selective in sharing viewership data. It has occasionally shared views for hits, and it logs a top 10 list, without data, on the service, itself. 

    Though the hours-viewed metric replaces Netflix's previous "views," which could count just a few minutes of a movie or series. Other major streaming services, like Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, don't regularly release viewership data. 

    Netflix's metrics still don't say how many people actually watched something on the service, and it doesn't include films or series that fall outside of its top 10. But it's the most transparent measurement so far embraced by Netflix. 

    "This is an important step forward for Netflix, the creators we work with and our members," Pablo Perez De Rosso, a vice president for content strategy at Netflix, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "People want to understand what success means in a streaming world, and these lists offer the clearest answer to that question in our industry."

    Netflix will publish both English and non-English rankings, and top-10 lists for more than 90 countries. The company said that it has hired the accounting firm EY to audit its figures. 

    At its current rate, "Red Notice" — which received largely poor reviews from critics — could become Netflix's most popular film ever. That title currently is held by the 2018 Sandra Bullock thriller "Bird Box," with 282 million hours viewed. 

    Tags:NetflixRed NoticeSquid Game



    Ex-OpenAI engineer who raised legal concerns about the technology he helped build has died

    Saturday, December 21, 2024
    Suchir Balaji poses for a photo in Hawaii in 2018. Balaji was a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who died in November 2024. (Balaji Ramamurthy via AP)

    Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.

    Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI's strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.

    "We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones during this difficult time," said a statement from OpenAI.

    Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said "appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation." The city's chief medical examiner's office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.

    His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still seeking answers, describing their son as a "happy, smart and brave young man" who loved to hike and recently returned from a trip with friends.

    Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling AI research lab for a 2018 summer internship while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.

    "Suchir's contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn't have succeeded without him," said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post memorializing Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what... Read More

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