You Can Thank Netflix For Those Extra 160 Hours Of Your Life
Stream on, Netflixers. Stream on.
Who says Netflix isn't good for you?
We've all been there. It's 2am on a Thursday and your eyes slowly glaze over as you watching your seventh straight hour of "The Office." You've had a long week and could really use some Michael Scott humor right now.
The 'Next Episode Will Play' countdown starts to taunt you and an overwhelming guilt washes over you. You fear you're wasting the best days of your life with fictional characters.
But fear not.
The good people over at cordcutting.com crunched some numbers and found that watching Netflix—one of the few TV streaming services sans commercials—adds about six days a year to your life.
Before you celebrate this good news with another episode, let's take a look at how they arrived at that conclusion.
It didn't take Will Hunting-level math skills to figure this one out.
CordCutting.com came up with the magic number—160 hours—by using some pretty basic math.
Let's math.
Netflix = 75 million subscribers who stream about 125 million hours per day. Reach back in your brain and put that junior-high algebra to the test.
Divide the two numbers and you'll come up with an average of 80 minutes of streaming per subscriber, per day.
Still with us?
Good.
An hour of cable TV has just over 15 minutes of ads.
According to Nielsen statistics, an average hour of normal TV has just over 15 minutes of ads. This turns out to be somewhere around 158.5 hours of commercials every year. Commercial-less Netflix spares its viewers from this suffering.
Ready for some more math?
158.5 hours = More than 6 days
Proceed to Netflix and chill all you want.
If you continue watching Netflix at the aforementioned pace for roughly another 80 years or so, it will add another year onto your life.