House of Cards is a big deal for Netflix, but what does a new season mean for network operators?
Using data from one North American fixed network operator, a comparison of the House of Cards Season 3 launch weekend traffic levels (red line), to the traffic levels of the previous weekend (blue line) shows a marked increase in traffic.
On this one network, Friday and Saturday evenings saw a 10%-15% increase in Netflix traffic over the previous week, while Sunday evening saw an increase between 30-35%.
Sundays are typically the day that generates the most network traffic, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see Sunday evening with the highest spike. Subscribers can only stream when they have free time, and for many households Sunday evening is far less busy than Friday or Saturday evening.
Since I’m personally only six episodes into the new season, I’m going to end this blog here and get back to streaming the remaining episodes. Who knows, maybe I can help generate a Monday evening Netflix spike for my ISP.
Oh, BTW – Please don’t try and use these figures to try and interpret any kind of House of Cards ratings. This data only demonstrates a change in Netflix bandwidth, which coincides with the launch of House of Cards.
It’s likely a ton of people streamed the new season this weekend, but had it not been available they would likely would have used Netflix to watch something else, like they do every weekend.

