A show is announced for 190 countries. Only 94 can be counted
I Am Solo is heading to Netflix in over 190 countries. Netflix publishes weekly top tens for 94. Of 974 Korean titles that ever charted anywhere, the median reached 2 countries and 447 reached exactly one.
The table this is written from: /netflix-which-country
A Korean dating show, I Am Solo, is heading to Netflix — in over 190 countries, according to the announcement that turned up in our morning collection.
That number is normal for this kind of news, and there is no reason to doubt it. But it is worth knowing what can and cannot be checked about it, because the figure a reader meets next will be much smaller and that is not a contradiction.
Netflix publishes charts for 94 countries
We counted this from the file itself. Netflix’s public Top 10 data covers 94 countries across 269 weeks, from 4 July 2021 to 23 August 2026. For every other country on earth, there is no published chart at all.
So “available in 190+” and “charted in N” are measurements of different things by different parties:
| Available in | announced by the distributor; no public record to check it against |
| Charted in | published weekly by Netflix, for 94 countries only |
Nobody outside the company can produce the first number. Everybody can count the second.
What the second number actually looks like
Of 974 Korean titles that ever entered any country’s weekly top ten in those five years:
| Charted in exactly 1 country | 447 | 45.9% |
| 2 to 4 countries | 211 | 21.7% |
| 5 to 9 | 78 | 8.0% |
| 10 to 49 | 171 | 17.6% |
| 50 to 89 | 59 | 6.1% |
| 90 or more | 8 | 0.8% |
The median Korean title charted in 2 countries. Almost half charted in exactly one and nowhere else.
Only eight titles in five years reached 90 or more: All of Us Are Dead (93), Squid Game (93), The Great Flood (93), Carter (92), Hellbound (92), My Name (91), The Glory (91), Desire (90).
93 of 94 is the widest any Korean title has ever gone in the sense anyone can count.
Why we are printing this next to an announcement
Not to catch anyone out. The two numbers measure different things and both can be true at once: a show can be switched on in 190 countries and reach a top ten in three of them, and that is an ordinary result rather than a failure — it is better than the median.
The reason to say it plainly is that a reader who sees 190 in a headline and 3 in a chart will assume one of them is wrong. Neither is. One is a distribution decision; the other is what people watched. Only the second one leaves a public trace, and even then only for 94 countries.
Every title we have, country by country, with the same caveat attached, is here.
What we cannot say
We cannot say where I Am Solo will chart, because it has not aired yet. We cannot say where any title is available, because Netflix publishes no catalogue by country. And we cannot say anything at all about the countries outside the 94 — not that a title did badly there, not that it did well.
An empty cell is an answer too, and this one is empty for about half the world.
Counted from Netflix’s public Top 10 files, copy dated 3 September 2026. Charting is not availability, and neither is a measure of quality.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Netflix — Public Top 10 files, all-weeks-countries.tsv, archived 2026-09-03 and counted row by row. 94 countries, 269 weeks, 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-23 · https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10
- Our own community and news archive — Daily collection, 2026-09-06 — the I Am Solo item that prompted the question · https://www.kculturewire.com/
What we checked
- Charting in a country and being available in a country are different facts, and this piece is about the gap between them rather than about either alone
- A country absent from a chart is not a country where a title was unavailable. It means the title did not reach that country's top ten, which is the common case
- The 94 is counted from the file itself rather than taken from any description of it, and it is printed beside the date of the copy we read
- We do not say the 190 figure is wrong. We say no public record can check it, which is a different statement and the only one we can support
- Our 974 Korean titles are titles that reached some country's top ten at least once. Korean titles that never charted anywhere are not in this count and cannot be
The data behind this
Written from the same data
Take this away — 10 cards
The figures in this article, as images. Free to repost with the address on them.
If you work in this business
Everything on this page is measured from the same weekly Netflix lists, per market and per title. We publish the pages free; what we sell is the same measurement cut to one company's catalogue — including the figures behind /netflix-which-country and /by-country and /netflix-tudum-data-dictionary.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →