On Monday morning, Netflix was among the major streamers that live streamed Artemis II’s lunar flyby as part of its partnership with NASA+. While the flyby wasn’t marketed heavily by Netflix due to its non-exclusive nature, it’s in line with the streamer’s live programming strategy, which aims to make the streamer the must-have destination for a select roster of sports and cultural events.
In 2026 alone, Netflix’s live event roster includes the concert livestream “BTS: The Comeback Live – Arirang,” “Skyscraper Live,” the Baseball World Classic as well as several WWE events and its weekly Monday Night Raw installments, with the streamer also gearing up to move into MMA with a fight between Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano on May 16. That’s coming off of the streamer’s annual NFL Christmas Day games, whose halftime show was headlined by Snoop Dogg.
The events have drawn impressive viewership, with the World Baseball Classic games reaching 31.4 million viewers — the most streamed baseball game ever — while the BTS concert scored 18.4 million global viewers and “Skyscraper Live” brought in 6.2 million views.
By being selective about what it streams live, it’s taking a weakness and turning it into a strength. Netflix has shown a reluctance to commit to any of the major leagues, meaning it doesn’t have the wide array of live programming that a Peacock or Paramount+ may have with its various sports deals. But the secret sauce for Netflix’s live event strategy lies in its choosiness, making the events it does put on all the more high profile and exclusive to keep audiences engaged.
“It creates these sort of tentpoles that happen on a regular basis that are interesting and that aren’t available elsewhere, and give people that reason … pay for one more month of Netflix, because there’s either something interesting happening now or it just creates that general background feeling that more interesting stuff will be coming out in the future,” Hub Entertainment Research founder Jon Giegengack told TheWrap.
Take Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL games. The first iteration in 2024 emulated a Super Bowl halftime show with Beyoncé Bowl, whose performance alone drew 27 million viewers, according to Nielsen. The streamer followed it up with a handful of guest performances alongside Snoop Dogg for the 2025 games, which scored an average of 29 million viewers.
It seems likely that Netflix will stick to its annual NFL games, with Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria telling press during the Next on Netflix event in March the Christmas Day games have worked well for both sides, though they’re open to considering various packages and games. “We’re always going to have the conversation with them about that, always evaluating, is that the right game or the right moment for us to do?”
“I think the strategy of [the] event game on Christmas, and obviously what we did with it, as far as adding Beyoncé Bowl, and then Snoop and doing some more bells and whistles around the NFL Christmas Day … has been an amazing partnership with them,” Bajaria said. “We really love the strategy of doing these Christmas Day games with them, and that’s worked well for us and for them.”
While that might be true, it’s important to note that boasting this strategy is in Netflix’s best interest, given it doesn’t hold season-wide rights. It does, however, hold the rights to WWE’s library of live events for just over a year, whose events tallied 525 million hours of viewing in 2025. Monday Night Raw accounted for nearly 340 million views while 185 million views were tallied by premium live wrestling events broadcast outside of the U.S. like SmackDown, WrestleMania, Elimination Chamber, Money in the Bank, Night of Champions and Royal Rumble.
Beyond that partnership, Giegengack predicts the streamer will keep going for variety in its live programming by selecting “periodic attention-grabbing cultural moments that sit on top of the giant library that Netflix has.”
“It gives off a feeling that Netflix is fresh, and there’s always something new … but because of the volume of scripted content that’s there, I think it’s easier to get that feeling,” he said.
“Love Story” ends with a bang
FX’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” ended with a ratings bang, soaring nearly 20% ahead of the prior week’s episode and 90% over the series premiere after its first day of streaming.
The finale also boosted viewership of the premiere episode, which added more than one million views on Hulu and Disney+ since the finale’s launch to reach over 14 million multi-platform views across FX, Hulu and Disney+.
“XO, Kitty” debuts strong
The third season of “XO, Kitty” made a splash on Netflix as it debuted as the streamer’s top English-language TV show for the week of March 30 with 12.9 million views. Viewership for the “To All the Boys” spinoff series outpaced “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” with 6.9 million views, “The Predator of Seville” with 4.7 million views and “One Piece” Season 2 with 3.5 million views.
“Top Chef” cooks
Following its pre-air debut on Peacock, the “Top Chef” Season 23 launch has tallied 2.4 million total viewers across platforms after one week of viewing on linear and two weeks of viewing on Peacock. Not only did the launch rise 53% over its Season 22 premiere in a comparable time frame, it also ranks as the top cooking reality season or series premieres across streaming in 2026 to date, based on Nielsen data.
“Top Chef” also benefitted from NBCUniversal’s reality universe, with 65% of first time viewers having tuned in to “The Traitors” season 4, which featured “Top Chef” host Kristen Kish.
Nielsen streaming spotlight
Nielsen’s top 10 streaming list saw several originals make their mark with debuts during the week of March 2, including “Young Sherlock,” which tallied 678 million minutes on Prime Video for its binge release and “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” which kicked off its second season with 467 million minutes on Apple TV. Hulu’s “Paradise” also made it into the top 5 original titles for the week with 694 million viewing minutes as it shifted to a weekly release after its initial 3-episode drop.
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- The “Paradise” Season 2 finale scored season-high viewership for the Dan Fogelman-created series with 4.3 million views in three days
- The historic launch of Artemis II drew an audience of over 18 million viewers as it aired across ABC, CBS, NBC, Telemundo, CNN, FOX News Channel and MS NOW before handing the baton to the streamers for the lunar flyby. There is not yet data for how the flyby performed across Netflix and the other streamers.
- “The View” closed out its first quarter with the strongest overall performance the daytime talk show has seen in five years
