Netflix, 2 billion hours

This company, on the ropes a few weeks ago with incredibly bone headed marketing moves, like raising prices and spitting off a major part of it's business under another name, is back big time after announcing astounding sales of 2 billion hours of movies streamed in the last quarter.

A number like that just needs to get dissected. I'm no Marcus (mkaz.com) but let me give it a try.

2 billion hours/40 hours per standard work week = 50 million work weeks

if a quarter is 4 weeks per month times 3 months thats 12 weeks which leads to

50 million weeks/12 = 417,000 quarters of standard hours watching movies

According to the CIA factbook there are about 140 million employed workers in the U.S.A. So they would have had 140 million * 40 hours * 12 weeks gives 67.2 billion hours of work time for the quarter.

So (tah dah!) 67 billion/2 billion is about 3.3% of time wasted watching movies from just this one source. Which from my experience is the main source of movie watching in a typical office. These days when you walk around there are so many people hunched over their i/android phones that it's not even funny. And since it's not tracked on the corporate network it's all free game.

And we are wondering about productivity? Maybe the reason India/El Salvador/Vietnam etc are so productive is that they don't have any internet for most of the country. My new pack of underwear that I bought Saturday at Walmart for $7 was made in El Salvador and good quality too.