Stranger Things helps Hull smash festive streaming stats
Netflix and YouTube were the clear winners for families streaming Christmas content across Hull and East Yorkshire.
Figures released by full-fibre broadband provider KCOM show that Netflix, whose big festive offerings this year included the epic conclusion to sci-fi drama Stranger Things, helped smash records for data streaming across the region.
Christmas Day proved to be KCOM’s busiest day ever for online traffic with 2,500,000 Gigabytes (GB) of data traffic used by households, 500,000 GB more than usual. That’s the equivalent to 625,000 HD movies or 5,000 years’ worth of music in a single day.
Richard Schäfer, KCOM CEO, said: “It’s been a huge Christmas for streaming services across the KCOM region and the amount of data that families are using is truly astounding.
“As the UK’s most reliable network*, our full fibre network dealt with the huge amount of surfing, streaming and gaming which enabled families to sit back and enjoy their Christmas specials, season finales and box sets seamlessly.”
During Christmas week itself the KCOM network carried a whopping 24.2 Pebibytes (PiB) of data. To put that into context, a single PiB can store over a trillion pages of plain text, equates to approximately 239,553 standard DVDs, and so many three-minute pop songs that they would take more than 2,250 years to play.
During the same week, KCOM customers streamed 10.9 PiB with YouTube (2.3 PiB) and Netflix (2.2 PiB) proving the streaming services of choice as viewers logged on to watch Stranger Things, Ricky Gervais’s new stand-up special Mortality, Emily in Paris and Rowan Atkinson’s seasonal comedy highlight Man Vs Baby.
Rounding out the Top Ten of the streaming services were TikTok (0.9PiB), Sky Streaming (0.9 PiB), Amazon Prime (0.6 PiB), iPlayer (0.6 PiB) Disney + (0.6 PiB), ITV Player (0.5 PiB) and Facebook video (0.5 PiB).
The biggest gaming console winners on Christmas Day were the PS5 and Xbox, with tens of thousands of users downloading new games and content updates.
Gaming and software updates accounted for 3.4 PiB of data transfer with 60% coming from KCOM’s unique local caches, making it a faster and more reliable download process for local users.
The biggest surges in data traffic came at 10am and 10pm on Christmas Day with a lull coming at 2pm as families sat down to their Christmas dinner before tuning in to see the King’s Speech.
The bumper Christmas comes on the back of a steady growth in data traffic on KCOM’s full fibre network since September 2025. During that time, the award-winning provider has seen a 15% increase in demand for data usage across its network.
* Based on Ofcom’s published report (May 2025) and supported by the most recent full year data from 2024. KCOM had the lowest average number of monthly faults per 1,000 customers compared to the national providers in the Ofcom report published May 2025, using the latest available data from 2024. For verification see kcom.com/ofcomreport.