How long people actually spend deciding what to watch is a number that gets repeated a lot online and sourced rarely. Here's what's actually been published, with dates, next to what we see in our own app.
A Currys survey from April 2024 found people spend around thirty minutes a day deciding what to watch, roughly 182.5 hours a year, with one in ten reporting it can take up to two hours in a single sitting. Nielsen has separately tracked the average time to choose rising to around eleven minutes, up from seven a few years earlier.
Currys, a UK electronics retailer, surveyed streaming habits in April 2024 and found an average of thirty minutes a day spent deciding what to watch, which works out to roughly 182.5 hours over a year. One in ten respondents said it can take as long as two hours on a given night.
Nielsen has tracked the average time spent choosing something to watch rising over time, from around seven minutes to around eleven minutes. It's a smaller number than the Currys figure, likely because it measures a single moment of choosing rather than a full evening's browsing that includes switching between apps.
In our own app, about 75 percent of titles shown get swiped away rather than saved. That rate isn't even across categories: series get swiped away around 84 percent of the time, films around 68 percent. Series are harder to commit to on a single swipe, which fits with what people describe anecdotally, a two-hour film is a smaller decision than a multi-season series.
Worth being direct about the limits here: our own userbase is still small, in the low hundreds of active users as of this writing. That's enough to describe a pattern in our own app honestly. It is not enough to claim it represents streaming audiences generally, and we're not claiming that.
None of the figures above are broken down by household size, but the mechanism is straightforward. One person browsing makes a decision. Two people browsing are negotiating, and a negotiation needs someone to propose a title before it can even start, which is a step solo browsing doesn't have.
A Currys survey from April 2024 found an average of thirty minutes a day, about 182.5 hours a year, with one in ten people reporting up to two hours on a given night. Nielsen has separately tracked the average time to choose rising to around eleven minutes, up from about seven.
In our own app's swipe data, yes: series are swiped away around 84 percent of the time versus 68 percent for films, against an overall average of about 75 percent. This reflects our own userbase, which is still small, not a general claim about streaming audiences.
Solo browsing is a decision. Browsing together is a negotiation, and negotiating requires someone to propose an option first, which adds a step solo browsing skips entirely.
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Written by Kevin Mertens · updated 15 September 2026