58 percent of U.S. Americans who pay for a video streaming subscription have access to three services or more according to data published in the Nielsen State of Play report on April 6th. As our chart shows, this accelerated fragmentation of the streaming market in the United States happened over the course of just three years.
In 2019, roughly two-thirds of U.S. residents 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, Amazon premiered its Apple TV+ offer, and throughout 2020, TV stalwart 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 had a negative experience with their streaming services and 69 percent said they hadn't canceled a single subscription over the past twelve months.
