This year, the SAG Awards took its annual broadcast ceremony in a new direction, streaming it for the first time on Netflix’s YouTube channel.
The presentation of the 29th Screen Actors Guild Awards show accumulated over 1.1 million views on Sunday night during the YouTube livestream. Additionally, in the first 12 hours, the show garnered 1.5 million overall views across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, according to a SAG Awards rep.
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The total amount of YouTube views is calculated by adding the view count for the 2023 SAG Awards’ main feed and the audio descriptive feed, as per Variety. The total does not include views amassed by breakout clips posted to Netflix’s YouTube and social media as the awards show took place, such as clips of celebrities’ acceptance speeches.
YouTube’s way of counting overall views differs from the way Nielsen calculates TV viewing metrics. Therefore, this year’s ceremony viewership cannot be directly compared to those of previous years.
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Sunday night’s SAG Awards livestream saw an average of roughly 230,000-250,000 concurrent viewers across both YouTube feeds. Last year, the show averaged 1.8 million total viewers for the simulcast on TBS and TNT and the year before that, in 2021, both networks averaged 957,000 total viewers.
Elsewhere across social media, clips of the 2023 SAG Awards gained an additional 19.4 million views and, on Twitter, the ceremony was the number one trending topic on Sunday night.
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“As this was a transitional year for the SAG Awards, it was broadcast on social media with Netflix and other media partners in lieu of a broadcast partner,” said the rep for the awards ceremony.
Netflix announced its multiyear deal to stream the SAG Awards in January. While this year’s show was streamed on their YouTube channel, Netflix plans to stream the event live globally directly on the streamer beginning in 2024.
The 2023 SAG Awards, which has a runtime of 2 hours and 14 minutes, without any ads, is available to rewatch on Netflix’s YouTube channel.