After Squid Game, Stranger Things 4 became the second Netflix series to pass one billion viewing hours.
The milestone came during Netflix’s 2022 release of the season, which was divided into two volumes. Volume 1 launched in May, while the final two episodes arrived in July. Their unusually long runtimes helped drive a huge total, especially the feature-length finale, “The Piggyback.”
Netflix’s viewing-hours statistic measures the total time subscribers watched a title, rather than simply counting individual viewers. Squid Game season 1 was the first Netflix series to cross the one-billion-hour mark and remained the benchmark Stranger Things 4 was compared with. Stranger Things 4 became the second title to reach that threshold.
This record is easy to confuse with Netflix’s separate “most popular” rankings, which use a title’s viewing during its first 91 days and can change as newer releases arrive. The trivia fact concerns the one-billion-hours milestone, not a permanent ranking against every later Netflix production.