Analysis: Fragmentation built streaming’s growth and now tests its limits

By almost every measure the industry likes to track, 2025 was a strong year for watching things. Households used more than 10 video services on average in the fourth quarter, daily viewing topped five hours and monthly entertainment spending climbed to $161, according to TiVo’s Q4 2025 “Video Trends Report.” Engagement reached its highest level since 2021.

And yet a sizable share of the people generating those numbers say they cannot find anything to watch.

Bango’s “Subscription Signals” report found that 30% of U.S. consumers said choosing what to watch often took longer than actually watching, a figure that rose to 46% among Gen Z and millennial respondents. One in four said they had run out of things to watch despite the volume available. Among Gen Z, that share reached 47%.

That gap, record consumption alongside record frustration, is the most useful lens for reading recent survey data from across a variety of pollsters. The supply problem is solved. The finding problem is not.

The numbers point up

The growth of streaming is undisputed.

Global streaming subscription revenue passed $150 billion in 2025, reaching $157.1 billion, a 14% increase year over year and triple the 2020 total, according to Ampere Analysis. Including advertising, streaming services generated $177 billion globally.

Content kept pace. Catalog volume across the major subscription platforms grew 20% compared with the prior January, Gracenote reported. Parks Associates counted more than 300 streaming services available in the United States, with the average internet household subscribing to 5.3 of them.

This is the environment the industry spent a decade building: more services, more titles, more hours watched, more money collected. By its own scoreboard, it worked.

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The discovery tax

The trouble is what all that choice costs the viewer in time and patience.

TiVo found that 40% of consumers checked two to three different apps before deciding what to watch. Bango put a clock on the behavior. Twenty-nine percent of Americans spent more than 30 minutes deciding what to watch, and viewers increasingly abandoned shows early, with a quarter saying they frequently stopped watching within the first three episodes.

“When it comes to streaming, people are running out of patience, rather than running out of content,” Giles Tongue, subscription expert at Bango, said in a statement.

He has a point. The constraint has moved. For most of television’s history, the limiting factor was supply — channels, time slots, shelf space at the video store. The limiting factor now is attention, and the search bar is where it leaks out.

Parks Associates has a term for the result: fragmentation fatigue.

With content scattered across hundreds of services, locating a specific show has become part of the work of watching it. Hub Entertainment Research found the confusion runs deep. Fewer than half of respondents could correctly name the platform carrying shows such as “Landman” on Paramount+ or “The Pitt” on HBO Max.

Fragmentation giveth, and it taketh away

Fragmentation drove the growth. It may now cap it.

The same survey data that shows people watching more also shows them increasingly willing to walk away. In the first quarter of 2026, 54% of U.S. respondents said they would likely cancel a subscription if they were not using it enough, Ampere reported. That instinct collides with another industry habit: making audiences wait.

The average gap between seasons of scripted streaming originals nearly doubled, from 12 months in 2020 to 21 months in 2025, according to Ampere. Long waits can build anticipation, viewing of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” rose 300% in the second half of 2025 ahead of its final season, but they also give subscribers a reason to cancel and return only when a marquee title comes back.

Originals were supposed to be the moat. They have largely stopped working as one. About two-thirds of consumers told Hub they could not confidently distinguish between the top platforms, unchanged from a year earlier. When nearly every service offers exclusive originals, exclusivity stops being a difference.

Aggregation becomes the strategy

If the problem is finding and the friction is fragmentation, the response writes itself: put more in one place.

Pay TV, long treated as the past, is being repositioned as part of the cure. Parks Associates found that 33% of pay TV subscribers stayed because the service offered more content in one place. Bundles follow the same logic. Hub reported that half of consumers strongly agreed that budget was the main factor in buying entertainment services, up from 41% a year earlier, and that 44% cited a single monthly bill as a key benefit of bundling.

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Price is doing some of the steering too. Advertising-supported on-demand and free ad-supported streaming reached 70% adoption in the fourth quarter, TiVo found, and 54% of consumers used an ad-supported subscription tier. Bango reported that 36% of consumers would accept twice as many ads for a lower monthly fee, rising to 49% among Gen Z.

The trade once thought unthinkable, more ads for less money, has become a routine way to manage a crowded bill.

“Aggregation is now a strategic advantage,” Elizabeth Parks, president and CMO of Parks Associates, said.

The economics support the shift. Bundles reduce churn, and reduced churn is worth more to a mature platform than another marginal subscriber. The pending Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, and the prospect of a combined Paramount+ and HBO Max offering, points in the same direction.

Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at TVREV, framed the moment plainly.

“The industry is entering a phase where effective curation and discovery matter just as much as scale,” he said.

Sports and local hold the floor

Two categories keep audiences anchored while everything else fragments.

Sports remained a primary draw. Nearly 60% of sports viewers relied on pay TV as their main source for sports content, according to TiVo, and sports programming on the five originally tracked subscription platforms more than doubled over 18 months to 3.3% of catalogs, reaching 5% with HBO Max included, Gracenote reported.

The pull is strong enough to spill outside official channels. More than one in five sports viewers used unofficial streams, a behavior especially common among those under 35, Altman Solon found — a leak, but also a signal of demand.

Local programming did similar work, accounting for nearly 30% of total viewing time, up about five percentage points year over year, per TiVo.

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Both share a quality the rest of the catalog lacks: a reason to watch now, in a specific place, that no algorithm needs to surface.

So what is all the data actually saying?

Read together, the reports tell a consistent story.

The industry won the contest it set for itself… more content, more reach, more revenue. And in winning it created a new one.

The viewer who pays $161 a month and subscribes to 10 services is not short on options. That viewer is short on a clear way through them.

Companies that treat discovery as a bolt-on feature will keep losing time and patience at the search bar. Those that treat curation and aggregation as the product may find that the next phase of growth looks less like adding titles and more like helping people find the ones already there.

The library is built. The work now is the card catalog.