New year is the perfect opportunity to think about.. time. We are absorbed in deliberations about the past and how quickly it flies. Often we vow to use it better by making resolutions; intended to improve ourselves 2026 will bring another aspect to our dilemmas - should we stay late at night to complete desired content as soon as possible or keep to our usual schedule and watch it after coming back home from work or school? A paper published by Hong Kong University Business School in November 2025 (Cheema, Arbab and Eshraghi, Arman and Rau, P. Raghavendra and Wang, Qingwei, The Morning After: Late-night TV and the Stock Market (November 26, 2025). HKU Jockey Club Enterprise Sustainability Global Research Institute Paper No. 2025/193) proved that this phenomenon even impacted stock market exchange - tired investors avoid buying new stocks. It will be more noticeable in June. For the first time more than half of the men’s football World Cup group stage matches will be held after midnight CET, which would impact viewership figures and… the daily schedules of ordinary citizens.

But how devoted are TV series fans? We will check it out on the example of shows, which had its releases at the night in the US or in Europe (in case of UK we take it as a part of continental Europe, using CET time) - VOD content is released at the same time worldwide, so we can easily compare viewership in different countries at the original launch date. However, it is an issue for streaming platforms, which have to decide if the release time would be better suited for the needs of European viewers or American ones.

Netflix releases its content in the midnight of Pacific Time, 3 a.m. Eastern Time and 9 a.m. Central European Time. It made an exception for the fifth season of Stranger Things to let American viewers  watch the show in the evening, avoiding any spoilers during the work time. We check interest of European viewers in shows that had a release in the middle of their night like fifth season of the “Stranger Things” (except of the final episode due to the release on New Year’s Eve where more people as usual were awake at that time), second season of “Andor” on Disney+, “It: Welcome To Derry” on HBO Max and second season of “House of the Dragon” HBO Max. For American viewers we would check viewership of the fourth season of “Stranger Things”,  second season of “Wednesday”, third season of “Squid Game” and third season of “Ginny and Georgia”.

For the most part, prime time viewing retains its crown, with the exception of “Wednesday”, which is considered as a family show. At least a tenth of viewers from the analyzed groups watched in the immediate hours after release even if it meant staying up in the middle of the night. Shows with weekly releases of episodes in Europe had a stable level of viewership. Bigger commitments could be observed in the case of the fifth season of the Stranger Things and third season of the Squid Game, which could be explained by the huge size of the fandom of these franchises and the media frenzy connected to it. It is also worth noticing that a chunk of viewers decide to watch the shows as soon as they wake up. This allows them to avoid dangerous spoilers from social media or Internet sites for almost the whole day.

But how many viewers, who decide to watch content at night, spend their evenings watching it again or finishing the remaining part? We checked an average for some of aforementioned shows:

Watching the show again on the same day happens very, very rarely among viewers who decided to watch it previously at night. When it is a thing, it appears in the case of productions where more than one episode was released at the same time and a small number  of viewers haven’t managed to watch them all at night. It is time to discover another thing - is there any difference between viewers watching content at its night release and those watching it at the first evening after it? Below we divide  into groups based upon their average time spent on the platform. All viewers who spent less than 67% of average time spent on the platform are specified as “light”, those between 67% and 133% are characterized as “normal” and those exceeding this value are described as “heavy”:

In all cases “heavy” users constitute the majority of viewers watching content in the middle of the night. It is even more visible in shows with the hard fandoms like Wednesday, Ginny & Georgia and Squid Game. Results for the prime time are less spread out, but “heavy” users are also the most dominant group.

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