Comcast customers watched a record 77 million-plus hours of programming during the operator’s Watchathon Week that ran April 3-9, wrote Andy Hunter, Comcast’s vice president of programming in a blog post. Each year, the operator offers a week of free video-on-demand programming that gives its customers access to all of its premium programming. This year, that also included Netflix for the first time.
![](https://oldbrief.promax.org/images/uploads/watchathon-2017-results-final.jpg)
Compared to last year, the Watchathon was up by 6 million hours compared to 71 million viewing hours in 2016. Overall, the event saw viewing rise 42 percent compared to the operator’s first Watchathon in 2013 when viewers tuned in to 54 million hours on the platform.
In addition, Comcast said mobile viewing on its Xfinity Stream App rose to 4.5 million viewing hours, up from the 1.5 million viewing hours watched on mobile devices in 2013.
More than 50 networks participated in this year’s event, up from 20 who took part in the first one. The number of series available also increased almost seven-fold, with 350 “current-season stacked shows” shows on line versus 53 in year one. Comcast also had 161 complete series on offer, up from 16 the first year.
READ MORE: Multichannel News
[Image of Dear White People courtesy of Netflix]
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