Industry Insights: Data shows viewers are still struggling to find content to watch even as streaming continues to overtake linear TV, while Netflix shakes up its ad offerings with 190 million monthly active viewers as it enters its fourth season of ad-supported tiers.
Viewers Still Struggling with Content Discovery
Content Bundling might be one of the biggest meta-trends currently in the industry, but for all its success and its popularity with consumers, it seems that it is not yet delivering one of its main promises: making content easier to find.
Hub Entertainment Research’s annual Conquering Content study finds that, while viewers continue to value choice, the fragmented landscape of services that they encounter when streaming remains a constant challenge.
There are some valuable data points in the new research.
- Editorial and algorithmic recommendations coming from streamers are considered less effective at helping viewers find new favorites compared to personal recommendations, trailers, clips and traditional ads or promos.
- Only 46% of viewers say streamer recommendations deliver shows they like
- 56% say streamer recommendations are simply promoting new shows, regardless of their own viewing preferences.
- Older content remains valuable. 60% of shows classed as ‘new favorites’ have multiple seasons ripe for bingeing.
- YouTube is always hovering in the background. Nearly 80% of all viewers (and 90% of 16-34 year-olds) say they frequently or sometimes turn to YouTube when they can’t find something else to watch
“With so many choices, matching viewers to programs that fit their taste and mood continues to be one of the toughest tasks for TV providers,” said Jason Platt Zolov, study author and Senior Consultant at Hub. “But viewers love having tons of options and lean into old favorites as a way to keep watching until a new hit breaks through. Streamers that deliver a balance of those old gems with well-timed exclusive new content will breed the strongest loyalties from viewers.”
Streaming vs Linear TV Audiences in the US
[Nielsen]
While there have been some headline-grabbing reports from the US that state that streaming now accounts for up to 60% of all TV time, data from the highly-respected The Gauge report from Nielsen suggests the figure is a bit lower than that. Nevertheless, it's still more than linear TV.
The latest October figures show that streaming captures 45.7% of all viewing. This is more than broadcast (22.9%) and cable (22.2%) combined, albeit by only 0.6 percentage points.
That gap is narrower than it was over the summer. In July, broadcast and cable fell to a combined 40.6%, while streaming hit 47.3%. This is a normal seasonal variance dictated by live sporting calendars, but the general trend YoY is very much for streaming to be taking increasing viewers from linear TV.
It will be interesting to see the figures for November when they come in, especially given the content distribution dispute between Disney and YouTube TV. For September, however, YouTube TV was the most watched media distributor across all platforms, with 12.6% of the total audience. This was followed by Disney at 10.7%, NBCUniversal at 8.6%, and Netflix at 8.3%.
H1 Figures
It’s worth looking at this in context of the advertising figures for the first half of the year. More people are watching more ads across all platforms, with ad-supported TV accounting for 73.6% of all viewing in Q2 2025.
The rise of ad-supported streaming formats is evident here, with AVOD, FAST and more contributing to 45.3% of the ad viewing total. This is up impressively from 42.4% in Q1 2025, with ad-supported broadcast shrinking the most. Again, this has a pronounced seasonal variation due to sports, but equally again the underlying trend is for streaming to be increasingly ad-supported.
Brian Fuher from Nielsen explains more in the short video below.
Netflix Shakes up Ads
[Netflix]
Staying with ads, Netflix is rolling out some interesting changes in its chosen metrics for ad performance. This all comes as the company wraps up its third ‘season’ of offering ad supported tiers and starts its fourth.
“Netflix now has thousands of advertising clients around the world,” explains Amy Reinhard, President, Advertising. “We’ve built and implemented the Netflix Ads Suite, our in-house first-party ad tech platform, in all 12 ad-supported countries. We’ve expanded our programmatic offering to include Amazon, AJA, Google Display & Video 360, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo DSP. We’ve partnered with over 50 global ad measurement vendors and have reached critical scale in all markets.”
With such success comes the need to quantify it, especially when looking at advertising revenues. Advertisers like to have solid numbers to work with when it comes to placing campaigns, and Netflix not only hopes that its new Monthly Active Viewers (MAV) KPI will provide that, but also potentially be adopted by other streamers to form what will effectively be an industry standard.
MAV is defined as members who have watched at least 1 minute of ads on Netflix per month. This is then multiplied by the estimated average number of people within a household (which Netflix gets from first-party data research) to reach the complete figure.
Its first published MAV is 190 million, which is thought to be between 61% and 63% of its global subscriber base (Netflix no longer releases subscriber data and estimates vary). This represents impressive take-up since the ad tier services launched in 2022, especially as they are not fully available worldwide.
Expanding Segmentation
That’s not all though. The company is also expanding its segmentation of targeted ads to cover options such as education, marital status, and household income; making onboarding ad clients easier, offering access to in-market audiences who are looking for products across automotive, beauty, travel and other categories; and testing a planning API to further narrow down targeted delivery of ad slots.
All this is currently available in the US and will be rolling out to ad-supported countries in 2026.
Also coming next year are the modular ad formats that the company announced in May. Rather controversially, these use AI to generate ads that mix-and-match creative elements from within Netflix content to generate slots that are more relevant to viewers and, reasons the company, more engaging as a result.
"We’re encouraged by early results and will roll these out globally by Q2 2026,” says Reinhard.
You can see the sort of content the company envisions being generated by this in its in-house ad for Netflix House below.
