Streaming catalogs continue to grow, but viewership remains focused on a small portion of what’s available

As TV audiences increase the time with video content they access from the internet, the streaming industry’s largest services are keeping pace by continually fortifying their catalogs with new content. Yet despite the ongoing infusion of new content, three key points should be top of mind as media continuous to fragment:

• Our total time with TV is flat
• Streaming is now our preferred TV channel
• A large portion of video content isn’t being watched

With respect to content choice, TV audiences have never had more. As of May 2025, the five subscription video on-demand (SVOD) services included in Gracenote’s Data Hub distributed nearly 590k TV shows, episodes, movies and sports programs¹.

While the increase in streaming content doesn’t drive more TV usage, it does align with channel choice among TV viewers. Our daily time with TV has remained flat at just under five hours² for several years, but streaming has grown to dominate from a channel perspective, accounting for a record 44.3% of TV usage in April 2025³.

Among SVOD services, Amazon Prime Video maintains its position as having the largest catalog, but Netflix is adding to its catalog at a much quicker pace: it grew its catalog by 18.2% in Q2, well above the average of 5% across the five services. And unlike the other four global providers, Disney+ distributes less content than it did at the start of the year (-5.6%). It does, however, offer 1% more content than it did at the time of our Q1 Data Hub update.

As a result of catalog volume changes, Netflix now accounts for just over 20% of the video content distributed by the five global providers.

As the range of streaming options expands, TV viewers have more than just SVOD content to consume. FAST channels represent the latest streaming option to compete for TV audiences, and viewership is rising. Tubi and The Roku Channel, for example, grabbed 4.4% of total TV viewing in April³, up 42% on a year-over-year basis. Growing engagement with these services has resulted in the availability of high-profile content, including Super Bowl LIX, and a notable uptick in new channels. As of May 2025, those channels were home to more than 188k TV shows, episodes, movies and sports programs.

The abundance of content across platforms, combined with our flat TV usage, highlights the importance of meaningful content discovery journeys. Said another way, it’s important for content owners and distributors to glean value from their content investments, and that can become challenging as the amount of content and channels accumulate.

To better understand how much of the available content across streaming services people are watching, Nielsen recently analyzed SVOD viewership data for the month of April. The analysis found that U.S. audiences watched approximately 500 trillion minutes of streaming programs. From there, the programs were bucketed into four quartiles to determine where viewership was focused.

The analysis found that across all of the streaming shows Nielsen measures, just under 95% of the programs accounted for just 25% of minutes viewed. In fact, only 5.7% of all programs accounted for 75% of viewing minutes.

Streaming viewership trends

Source:  Nielsen Streaming Content Ratings; April 2025, P2+ viewing

The streaming viewership trends in April illustrate both the popularity of high-profile, headline-grabbing titles, and the immense catalog depth of content that is largely unwatched. At the same time, research from UserTesting highlights the challenges in trying to find something new to watch, as well as the impact of the over-abundance of independent streaming services—a key driver of high churn rates.

As TV audiences continue gravitating to streaming content—in all of its varieties—distributors and publishers can help ease content discovery challengers AND better utilize their catalog depth by using deep, descriptive metadata to provide viewers with more of what they’re looking for.

For additional insights about video distribution across global SVOD services, visit Gracenote’s Data Hub, which is updated quarterly.

Notes

1. This is the absolute count of every individual program, episode and movie to illustrate the total volume of content available on these five services.
2.  Daily TV usage was 4:51 in Q4 2024; Nielsen National TV Panel
3. Nielsen’s The Gauge.