Research: US streaming audiences riding nostalgia wave
October 9, 2025
Digital i has released its latest Trend Report: Nostalgia on Demand, exploring how US streaming audiences are increasingly spending more of their viewing time on older and nostalgic content.
The report primarily examines the share of viewing time to titles by US subscribers to the major streaming platforms Disney+, Netflix and Prime Video from January 2021 to June 2025.
Some key takeaways include:
- Share of US viewing time on these services to series that first launched more than 10 years prior grew to 37 per cent in H1 2025, up from 32 per cent in H1 2021.
- Since H1 2021, viewing share to titles that first launched two or more years previously has not dropped below 68 per cent, rising as high as 80 per cent in some measured half-year periods.
- Grey’s Anatomy (pictured) generated 3.5 billion hours viewed across 432 episodes between H1 2021 and H1 2025, with an average of 8.1 million hours viewed per episode.
- However, Stranger Things generated an average of 49.4 million hours viewed per episode, for a total of 1.7 billion hours from just 34 episodes.
- Stranger Things was also the only streaming original ranked (#6) in the top 10 list by hours viewed between H1 2021 and H1 2025, the other nine titles were all licensed series.
- In H1 2025, 37 per cent of viewing time to content that launched before 2020 on these services by US subscribers was to comedy.
- Outside of the US, in H1 2025, South Korean subscribers spent an average of just 16 per cent of their viewing share on content released in 2016 or later, compared to 42 per cent in the Nordics.
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