House of Cards Gets Huge Season 2 Viewership on Day 1

The show's second season scores a big audience within hours of premiering on Netflix

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Nathaniel E. Bell / Netflix

All 13 episodes of season two of House of Cards premiered on Netflix at midnight PST Friday. Less than 24 hours later, the first numbers are in, and they’re big, according to Variety.

Though Netflix does not disclose its viewership data and Nielsen does not track streaming services, Variety enlisted Procera Networks, a broadband technology firm, to get a sense of how many people were tuning in to House of Cards on Valentine’s Day. More Netflix subscribers are streaming the second season than the first, according to their data.

An astounding 15 percent of Netflix subscribers watched the first episode in a six to eight hour period on an undisclosed Internet service that Procera monitored on Monday. Last year, Procera — which measures usage of networks of six of the top 10 cable operators in the U.S. — found that just two percent of subscribers watched at least one episode of House of Cards throughout the entire premiere weekend.

Netflix reported 40.4 million subscribers globally (31.2 million in the U.S.) in Sept. 2013.

[Variety]