Viewing to documentary content on streaming services has been rising pretty much since the first “tudum” was heard in homes around the world, but that demand has seen significant growth in recent years.
The pandemic-led unscripted boom and the subsequent global success of titles such as Netflix’s Tiger King helped to fuel subscriber appetite for engaging real world stories – particularly in the true crime sub-genre.
Recent Digital i research found that the average subscriber account viewing time to documentary content on Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and Max, collectively, rose to an average of 4 hours and 34 minutes per month.
This is up by 26 minutes on the average of 4 hours and 8 minutes per month recorded in 2023 and by 29 minutes on the 4 hours and 5 minutes per month in 2022.
That works out as an average of an extra 5 hours and 12 minutes documentary watching per year, between 2023 and 2024.
Regional interest
Our numbers bear out how global streaming subscribers are spending more time watching documentaries and docu-series and our latest data suggests that this trend will continue - with Australian viewers leading the charge.
Looking at the first quarter of this year, Digital i found that more Australian subscribers watched documentary content on major global streaming services than subscribers in any other country that we measure.
(That would be the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Australia, South Korea and Japan).
A collective 75% of Australian subscribers to Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and Max watched at least 20 minutes of a documentary or docu-series between January and March 2025. Japan ranked lowest, with only 32% of streaming subscribers in the country viewing documentary content in Q1 2025.
These results tallied with our recent report on viewing to the true crime sub-genre, which again saw the least viewing coming from Japan, while Australia was in second place; pipped to the top spot for true crime streaming by Canadian subscribers.
Our data shows that, taking Netflix as an example, 15 of the top 20 documentary titles (ranked by reach) were true crime docs in 2024, compared to just six titles in 2020.
And as the chart below shows, the majority of the most-watched docs of 2024 on Netflix were from the true crime sub-genre, with titles such as American Nightmare and What Jennifer Did achieving considerable account reach – and it appears to be viewing to this content that is fuelling overall documentary and docu-series engagement for streamers.
Would you like to know more?
To read our latest streaming Trend Report, click here.
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