NBC Hits 1B Full Episode Streams

NBC announced today it has delivered more than 1 billion full episode streams since launching in Oct. 2006.

These are self-reported numbers, so there aren’t really good comparisons to competing networks. But according to Nielsen, ABC.com regularly beats NBC in terms of having the most-streamed shows on a monthly basis. Lost had 35.8 million total streams in March 2009, by Nielsen’s measure. Update: Also, NBC tells us that each chapter of a show qualifies as a stream, so there were likely far fewer than 1 billion full episodes that were fully streamed.

However, the NBC numbers are only for its NBC Rewind product, which streams episodes on NBC.com. The network also contributes its content to the increasingly popular Hulu (which it also jointly owns). As a fan of NBC’s The Office, I can attest that I almost always watch on Hulu.

NBC said it had seen 43 million total streams from widgets (which I believe includes all video embeds) since January 2008. User-driven syndication seems to be especially instrumental in increasing reach:

Season to date (September 2008 through March 2009), widget streams comprised 19 per cent of total short form video streams served on NBC.com and increased the overall reach of the site online by an average of 43 per cent per month in Q4 2008 alone.

NBC said its mobile site has also seen significant growth, with 2.4 million streams of full episodes of TV shows in the first quarter of 2009, more than the total number of streams served in all of 2008.