A safety recall of 18,400 Velaire ViewKey streaming devices has exposed how the Belgian service counted audiences for its shows, including reporting short previews and repeat household profiles as viewers. The Plausible Post reviewed data voluntarily supplied by 6,214 device owners and found that figures presented as weekly viewers for the series The Quiet Floor were more than three times the number of distinct episode starts in the sample.
Velaire used the larger figures in sales material and publicity for the Dutch- and French-language series, which it described as a national streaming hit. The recall notice, published on Friday 16 October, concerns a power adapter that can overheat; technical checks prompted owners and a consumer group to examine what the device recorded about viewing.
The counts behind the hit
The company’s dashboard labelled the measure “viewer equivalents”, according to screenshots supplied by customers. In one week of data, Velaire reported 804,000 viewer equivalents for The Quiet Floor; the Post’s review found 219,000 distinct episode starts across the sampled devices. The sample covers ViewKey users, not every subscriber or phone app, so it cannot establish the service’s total audience.
The gap came from two practices, the data showed: a preview that played for as little as 30 seconds could count as a start, and a stream could be multiplied by the number of household profiles registered to the device. Guusje Veenstra, a Brussels-based media-measurement consultant who examined the anonymised records, said the method “turns a possible viewer into several assumed viewers before anyone has watched an episode”.
Velaire promoted The Quiet Floor as having an average weekly audience of more than 800,000 during a campaign that helped sell €3.2 million in advertising packages, according to a public presentation reviewed by the Post. Piotr A. Christiansen, who worked on audience reporting for a contractor to the service, said staff knew the figure was an estimate but saw it repeatedly shortened to “viewers” in materials for advertisers.
Recall puts the figures under review
“We were measuring households, then selling the number as if every profile had sat down to watch,” Christiansen said. He said he raised the distinction in 2025, but could not confirm whether the same formula was used for every show or advertising deal. The Post found no evidence that Velaire fabricated stream records; the dispute is over what its published totals meant.
Velaire said the dashboard was designed to estimate potential household reach, not count individual people, and that its marketing language “did not explain that distinction clearly enough”. It said it has stopped using the disputed measure, commissioned an outside review and will send corrected audience figures to advertisers by 30 October. The company disputes that the recall was connected to its viewing data.
The Belgian product-safety service has asked Velaire for technical details on the recalled adapter and passed the audience findings to the country’s media-measurement council for review. Two advertisers told the Post they have paused renewal talks until corrected figures arrive. The company says the ViewKey fault affected the adapter, not viewing records, and has offered replacements to owners.
