Cord cutting doesn’t only save you money — it saves you time as well. In fact, it turns out that Netflix may be saving you from having to watch an astonishing 160 hours worth of commercials every year. This estimate comes from streaming enthusiast site Cordcutting.com, which reached that number by looking at publicly available Netflix subscriber data.
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It works like this: There are more than 75 million Netflix subscribers who are streaming more than 125 million hours every day. That means every subscriber watches some 100 minutes of Netflix video each day. Nielsen data says that the typical hour of cable TV comes with 15 minutes and 38 seconds of commercials in it.
Putting these numbers together, the site came up with an average of 158.5 hours that a Netflix subscriber would save each year by streaming instead of watching cable. In total, Netflix saves humanity 32.57 million hours of ads each day.
As Business Insider points out, there’s one caveat here: The assumption that one hour watching Netflix equals one hour of watching cable. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said more than once that Netflix is competing against other forms of entertainment, not just cable. That means the estimate only applies under the assumption that an hour of Netflix streaming equals an hour of regular cable TV watching.
