Netflix’s peak streaming day hit 250 million hours worldwide

It seems most people turn to the same antidote for their holiday hangover: Netflix.

Netflix’s vice-president of content delivery Ken Florance told reporters at a press briefing in Los Gatos, California that Netflix’s peak streaming day took place on January 8th, 2017, and hit 250 million hours of content streamed.

Generally, said Florance, the peak day is January 1st, and the company is unsure why the peak took place about a week later than usual this year — though it might have something to do with prepping for the Golden Globes, which aired that evening.

Florance’s comments came at a two-day press event held at Dolby and Netflix headquarters. To provide context for the peak, Florance stated that Netflix streams hundreds of millions of hours of content per week through its custom Open Connect content delivery network (CDN).

Additionally, Netflix focused on its methods of encoding that allow for per-shot optimization — delivering the greatest picture for fewest bits. Florance said that historically other platform’s streams consume much higher amounts of data than Netflix, especially those that are crowd-sourced, like YouTube, which can’t perform the same amount of parsing and encoding on its content.