The Postwar Streaming Market

What do the death of peak TV, the SVOD bundle boom and the rise of ad-supported streaming have in common?

All three are hallmarks of what one might dub the post-streaming wars era of the subscription video business. With Netflix’s victory in the SVOD-centric battle cemented last year, a shift in focus from subscribers to ad dollars, new partnerships between rivals and a significant cooling of the content arms race are all signifying that active hostility has given way to an uneasy truce.

Of course, truce does not equal peace in the tumultuous SVOD business. That’s why Variety Intelligence Platform’s latest special report on the sector, “The Postwar Streaming Market” (presented in partnership with Luminate), is focused on the challenges and complexities coming to the fore as a new era of streaming takes shape.

Chief among these challenges is maintaining — or in many cases securing — robust subscriber engagement, and a major portion of this report is therefore dedicated to content consumption trends over the first half of 2024.

Making extensive use of Luminate’s new Streaming Viewership (M) tool — the data provider for Variety’s weekly Streaming Originals charts — this report offers perhaps the most detailed look yet available at original content viewing patterns on the major SVOD services.

Luminate data reveals not only the most popular titles of the year thus far but the share of original series viewership those titles accounted for, how quickly engagement falls off for binge versus weekly releases and which of the most-watched titles qualified for the Hollywood guilds’ new success-based residual — a major step forward for data transparency in the streaming age.

But content is only part of the picture, and this report also furthers the in-depth streaming industry coverage VIP+ readers have come to expect, from the latest data on SVOD spending to ongoing trends including “streamflation” and the crackdown on password sharing.

With the streaming business moving further into its postwar period, understanding these trends remains paramount to understanding media at large, as the sector continues to reshape itself around the ever more complex business of streaming.