Not Enough Screens for This Many Streams

58 percent of U.S. video streaming subscribers pay for access to at least three different services according to data published in Nielsen's latest State of Play report. That's up from just 32 percent in 2019, as our chart shows. The increasing fragmentation of the U.S. streaming market, with Apple, Disney and HBO all launching their own services, has likely contributed to this trend.

In 2019, roughly two-thirds of U.S. streaming subscribers had, at most, subscriptions to two streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Hulu. Netflix in particular dominated the picture in the United States, with 49 percent of respondents to a YouGov survey conducted in April 2020 claiming the platform was an essential video streaming service compared to just 31 and 22 percent thinking the same of Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, respectively. Towards the end of 2019, major agents of change started to crop up in the domestic market. On November 12, the Walt Disney Company launched its streaming service Disney+, which stood at 130 million subscribers at the end of 2021. Ten days prior, Apple premiered its Apple TV+ offer, and throughout 2020, TV stalwarts Comcast and WarnerMedia joined the fray with Peacock and HBO Max, respectively.

This multitude of providers with well-known brand associations, combined with the coronavirus pandemic confining many U.S. residents to the indoors during the past two years, is most likely the cause for more and more streaming service users diversifying their subscriptions. Fittingly, more than a quarter of survey respondents claimed to pay for more than five video streaming services simultaneously. This figure is unlikely to change any time soon. Only one in twenty participants in the Nielsen survey felt negatively about their streaming experiences and 69 percent said they hadn't canceled any subscriptions in the past twelve months.