In a shocker to no one, the streaming revolution isn’t slowing down any time soon.
In November, streaming viewership increased by 7.6% year over year, according to Nielsen, and households devoted an average of nearly 42% of their TV time streaming shows and movies. While YouTube owned a record 10.8% of TV viewership in November, Netflix briefly hit a record of 8.5% of TV during the same week that it livestreamed the much-hyped boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
With stiff competition and new subscriptions slowing, streamers across the industry continue to contend with this new era of their businesses. A number of streamers spent 2024 building out ad tiers and bundling services to increase consumer uptake even as some of their parent companies struggled to stem the losses from their shrinking cable businesses.
We chatted with two streaming analysts, Eric Schmitt at Gartner and Mike Proulx at Forrester, to get a sense of some of the biggest trends that could shape the streaming business in 2025.
Bundling will only continue
Mike Proulx: As prices for streaming services continue to rise, and the both need and desire for more streaming services amongst consumers, because they’re trying to consume all the great content that exists across all of these streaming services, it creates a cost-prohibitiveness. There needs to be mechanisms to save money. That’s why bundling is back in a big way. We’re going to continue to see in 2025 big promotions amongst streamers and probably some unexpected partnerships that exist to be able to cross-sell and cross-promote and gain subscribers, but more importantly, to retain subscribers and reduce churn.
Eric Schmitt: This falls right under that heading of “revenge of the cable bundle.” We will see more bundling because it’s too dang hard to, as a consumer, find what you’re looking for. It’s too hard as an advertiser to get the kind of reach and scale that you want. I think we’ll see a theme of simplicity in 2025…I love JustWatch and Reelgood, they’re awesome tools for discovery, but we really shouldn’t have to go to a third-party app or website and go on a wild-goose chase just to figure out where to watch Season 2 of The Wire, for example.
Shoppable ads and other interactive formats won’t be a silver bullet
MP: This is one of the ways in which streaming can and will differentiate itself from TV of days past, and that is interactivity…Even though we see an increase in the amount of streaming users who are willing to tolerate ads for reduced prices, it doesn’t mean that they like ads. It doesn’t mean that they’ve suddenly fallen in love with advertising. Given the option to be able to skip an ad, they will at their earliest convenience. The challenge with interactive advertising as it exists is that it has to be executed in a way that’s going to be as non-interruptive to the viewing experience as possible in order to succeed.
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ES: Amazon is absolutely the player to watch, to state the obvious. They’re the e-commerce behemoth, and if anyone can pull this off, most likely it will be them…I think it’s one of those things where it may well change at some point. Amazon would be the player to watch. But based on all of history so far, I’m a bit skeptical we’ll see any huge breakthroughs in 2025. It seems to be much better suited to short-form video where people are leaning in, not leaning back…they don’t want to interrupt their hour and a half viewing experience to go shopping, whereas if we’re scrolling through our feed, killing time or multitasking, it’s a lot easier to make impulse buys.
More consolidation
ES: Consolidation is likely to continue. The viewers have left. Let me be specific: many of the viewers have left. There’s a lot of TV sets on and no people in the room, figuratively speaking. Then there’s also, what, frankly, at this point, are legacy rules around broadcast station groups. There’s relatively little broadcast viewership compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago. One could see a scenario, perhaps, where those rules are relaxed…Consumers didn’t want 500 cable channels. They certainly don’t want 82 platforms where they have to figure out what to watch. Advertisers want standards. They want consolidated reach and the ability to get to large blocks of people with efficiency. All of that points to further consolidation.
MP: Properties like Disney have [networks] such as ABC; that is content that they’re able to distribute to Hulu, Disney+, etc., across their properties…but there will come a time when those properties get folded into the larger streaming services and are no longer available via traditional methods. How close we are to that day is anyone’s guess.
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