I got bored so I graphed the amount of time I’ve spent watching Netflix.

Okay. Now some Photoshop commentary.

Here’s a chart of my friend.

Here’s the same data grouped by week and plotted with a line for better readability.

So at least one of us is getting better. Now some quick stats. I watched 4.7 days worth of Netflix over a span of 88 days. So I spent 5.39% of that time in a televisual-induced vegetative state. My friend has spent 17.9 continuous days watching Netflix over a span of 898 days, ie 2% of the total time. So while my friend has watched more overall, I’ve gone on a harder speed binge than he has. But judging by the recent spike in his Netflix usage, he might claim the title if he keeps going.

Methodology:

Netflix subscribers can see their entire viewing history online. These records state the show watched, date, and duration. I copy/pasted this into Excel and hoped that with a couple of minutes I’d have some sexy looking graphs. Unfortunately, Netflix seems to get the duration completely wrong a quarter of the time. On closer inspection, Netflix shows how much of a show you’ve watched if you search for that show and go to it’s page. For example, if you’ve watched 30 minutes of an hour-long program, the bar will state 30/60 minutes completed.

So I went through nearly 800 records manually checking the correctness of duration. With the hard part done, I grouped time-watched into distinct days. SInce my friend’s viewing history spanned more than two years, I grouped his time into weeks.

This was somewhat inspired by this story of Netflix video streaming accounting for 22.2% share of North American Internet traffic. Post your graphs of your Netflix-induced comas below.