Hulu Originals On A Hot Streak, But Could That Hurt Disney's Bottom Line? [Parrot Analytics]

Friday, 25 August 2023, 6:34 am
Press Release: Parrot Analytics

Hulu is having a certifiable moment with a string of exceptionally in-demand original series in recent weeks.

New seasons of The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, and the rebooted Futurama have all debuted in the top 0.2% of TV series across all platforms with both US and worldwide audiences.

Futurama’s success is a good sign for Hulu’s strategy to dominate the adult animation space with US audiences. Eight of the 10 most in-demand adult animation series in the past year were available to stream on Hulu. Six of these were available exclusively on the platform.

This Hulu Originals momentum comes on the back of Hulu slowly growing its demand share for original series in 2023, moving up from 6.9% in Q4 2022 to 7.2% as of Q2 2023. This bodes well for the impending Disney+ and Hulu combined app. Taken together, the new platform would easily overtake Amazon Prime Video as the second most in-demand streamer for original series in the US and worldwide, behind only Netflix.

However, this momentum may end up hurting parent company Disney’s bottom line. Disney is getting ready to buy out Comcast’s estimated $9B stake in Hulu in early 2024. An increasingly valuable Hulu would increase the price tag on that share of the pie, during an era of increased belt tightening across the industry.

Time-Shift Analysis

Only Murders in the Building hit a peak demand of 50.65x on July 28, a week before the latest season premiered on August 08.
Futurama hit a peak demand of 77.56x on Jul 27, just 3 days after it premiered on July 24.
The Bear hit a peak demand of 37.04x on June 27, 5 days after all the episodes from season 2 released on June 22. The series has also received 13 Emmy nominations for its first season.

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Adult Animation

This chart suggests a major overlap between the audiences of Futurama and those of King of the Hill. The recent success of Futurama should bode well for the upcoming King of the Hill reboot.
From July 1-August 20, Futurama has been not just the most in-demand Hulu Original, but the most in-demand series available on the entire Hulu plaftorm.
Hulu’s focus on becoming the go-to platform for adult animation fans should be an effective one for retaining subscribers.
If we look at shows that the viewers of Futurama also watch, the series with the most overlap are long-running standards of the adult animation genre like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Rick and Morty - all available to stream on Hulu.

Parrot Analytics

Global television demand measurement

Parrot Analytics is the leading global content demand analytics company for the multi-platform TV business. With the world's largest TV audience demand datasets, the company currently tracks more than 1.5B daily expressions of demand in over 100 languages from 200+ countries to reveal the content consumers engage with and watch the most across platforms.

As a trusted partner to some of the biggest media companies and content creators in the world, Parrot Analytics optimises content workflows in real time. The company's TV analytics products result in better production, distribution, acquisition and marketing decisions, as well as accelerated SVOD platform success.