Netflix is pretty popular, it turns out, with more Americans saying they’d rather keep the streaming giant than any other network or streaming service if they were forced to choose, according to a new study from Hub Entertainment Research released Wednesday.
The study, which looked at about 1,700 people in the U.S. in January, found that 44% of respondents would keep Netflix if they had to cut back; the next closest network, CBS, only grabbed 29% of respondents.
Young respondents were even more passionate about Netflix. Nearly 60% of viewers between the ages of 16 and 34 said they’d keep the service over anything else — making it twice as popular as Hulu, the second-ranked service or network, which pulled in 29 percent of viewers in the age range.
“It would be easy to explain Netflix’s strong position as a must-have TV source by citing the sheer variety of its content–it offers ‘something for everyone,’” Peter Fondulas, principal at Hub and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Then again, the same can be said of the variety of shows on broadcast networks. Whether it’s a function of a higher level of show quality or of strong branding — or both — Netflix has managed to set itself apart from networks that offer a similarly wide variety of genre choice.”
One thing helping Netflix is its ubiquity. At this point, almost everyone in the U.S. has apparently heard about the company behind “Stranger Things” and “Narcos,” with 99% of respondents saying they’re aware of the service and 80% being able to accurately describe what it offers. Only 66% of respondents could accurately describe YouTube, according to Hub, while less than 60% could describe HBO Now and Amazon Prime Video.
Netflix is also strongly tied to its “originals” brand, with the word “originals” making about 50 percent of respondents first think of the streaming giant, according to Hub.