OTT Streaming: the future of television viewing

Words David Howell

After years of platforms competing through aggressive expansion and lavish content spending, the OTT market is entering a more demanding phase. Growth must now produce revenue and lasting customer value, but also, vitally, engagement.

This does not mean audiences have stopped streaming. Nielsen reported that streaming accounted for 44.8% of US television viewing in May 2025, overtaking broadcast and cable combined for the first time. Ampere Analysis also found that global streaming subscription revenue reached $157.1bn in 2025, rising by 14% year on year, and forecasts a further 29% increase by 2030.

Rather than reaching peak streaming, the industry may have reached peak proliferation. Mature markets cannot indefinitely support more platforms chasing the same households and attention. Success must therefore be redefined around what happens after acquisition: how frequently customers return, how widely they explore a catalogue, how long they remain and how profitably their attention can be monetised.

“Demand hasn’t run out, but what has run out is patience for growth at any cost,” Igor Oreper, chief strategy officer at Bitmovin, explains to FEED. “Subscriber counts were never the real constraint, the economics were, and the industry is now being made to engineer for margin.”

From subscriber growth to customer value

For more than a decade, quarterly subscriber additions became streaming’s defining scorecard. That measure was appropriate while platforms were expanding into untapped households and territories. In saturated markets, however, subscriber totals reveal much less about the underlying health of a service.

Netflix’s Q2 2026 results illustrate how priorities have changed. Rather than leading with subscriber numbers, the company identifies revenue as its primary growth measure and operating margin as its principal profitability metric. Netflix generated quarterly revenue of $12.56bn, up 13.4% year on year, while operating income rose by 11% to $4.19bn. Its operating margin reached 33.4%. For the full year, it expects revenue of between $51bn and $51.4bn, alongside an operating margin of 31.5%. Advertising revenue is projected to approximately double to $3bn.

Netflix members watched more than 97 billion hours during the first half of 2026, up 2% year on year. Yet the company argues that quality and variety matter alongside quantity, reflecting a shift towards understanding which content attracts customers and strengthens retention.

Disney’s results demonstrate that profitable streaming is no longer confined to Netflix. Its Entertainment SVOD business generated operating income of $582m in Q2 2026, up 88% year on year, while revenue grew by 13%. The division achieved its first double-digit quarterly operating margin at 10.6%, putting Disney on track to deliver an SVOD margin of at least 10% for the full financial year.

Tom Price, director of content distribution at Roku, says the next phase will bring sustained rather than explosive expansion. “In the future, all TV will be streamed. We’re not there yet, so that means streaming will continue to grow. It’s not sudden, but it’s relentless year after year. We’ll keep seeing more hours streamed, but not through an explosion of new services like we saw in the last few years.”

The picture also varies geographically. Anurag Tyagi, founder of OTTASIA, comments that treating slower expansion in the US and UK as evidence of a universal ceiling overlooks considerable headroom elsewhere. “India, Southeast Asia and the Gulf are still adding new streamers by the million,” he explains. “The west hit its own ceiling and decided that was the ceiling for everyone.”

“A smaller, highly engaged audience that stays longer and can be monetised effectively through both subscriptions and advertising can be far more valuable than a large but transient subscriber base,” says Mary Gabrielyan, chief strategy officer at AI Digital.

Retention begins before the cancellation screen

Retention has become critical because streaming customers are price-conscious and comfortable moving between services. Deloitte found that 39% of US consumers had cancelled at least one paid SVOD service during the preceding six months in 2025. The figure exceeded 50% among Gen Z and Millennials. Approximately 24% had cancelled and then rejoined the same service. This ‘churn and return’ pattern shows how consumers increasingly assemble temporary subscription portfolios around particular programmes, films or sports seasons.

The cancellation screen is the end of the retention process, not its beginning. Earlier warning signs include fewer logins, abandoned searches, longer time-to-play, buffering, failed payments and increased support contact.

Donald Res, chief solutions officer and co-founder at Cleeng, tells FEED that AI-based risk scoring can identify vulnerable subscribers between 30 and 90 days before departure. Payment recovery is another overlooked opportunity. According to Res, smart retries, account updater services and dunning campaigns can typically recover 60-70% of failed payments, addressing a significant source of involuntary churn.

“The tactic should always match the driver,” Res explains. “Reaching for a discount regardless of cause is the most common mistake we see; it treats every churn signal the same way when the fixes are quite different.”

A household encountering billing friction needs a simpler payment journey, while someone suffering playback failures needs the technical problem resolved. Blanket discounts may defer cancellation, but they can also undermine pricing.

Roku’s Price says content variety can turn a temporary subscriber into a lasting one. “People who are only in a service for one title are often most at risk. Once they’re watching a range of content, they’re far less likely to leave. The intervention can come earlier by getting customers engaged with a variety of content, not just the one show that brought them in.”

Platforms must also examine unsuccessful intent. Tyagi argues that an early sign of churn is not what a customer watches but what they cannot find. Someone who searches repeatedly, receives no useful result and closes the application may have psychologically left long before cancelling.

Retention consequently depends on integrated data. Playback, billing, marketing, search and support systems often hold separate versions of the customer relationship. Connecting them enables providers to distinguish between technical, financial and content-driven disengagement and to respond appropriately.

Discovery becomes the new content battleground

Content remains streaming’s essential product, but catalogue scale has lost some of its power as a differentiator. Around 41% of consumers surveyed by Deloitte in 2025 said SVOD content was not worth its price, despite households spending an average of $69 a month on four services. The problem is the gap between possessing content and making its value visible. A vast library can appear small when viewers encounter irrelevant recommendations or struggle to decide what to watch.

“Library size is a cost line now. Discoverability is where the return is,” Oreper comments. He argues that basic title-level metadata constrains recommendation systems because it reveals too little about what programmes contain. Richer scene-level information can improve search, recommendations and the reuse of archive material, enabling platforms to surface themes and moments hidden inside older titles.

Recommendation engines present a strategic tension: they must reduce browsing time without becoming so narrow that they continually reflect previous choices. Some of television’s strongest experiences come from finding something unexpected or encountering a shared live event. This matters as premium streamers compete with social and creator platforms. YouTube accounted for 12.5% of US television viewing in May 2025, while its viewing on TV screens had risen by more than 120% since 2021. Deloitte also found that a majority of Gen Z and Millennial respondents believed that social platforms offered better film and television recommendations than streaming services.

OTT providers are competing with interfaces designed around continuous discovery, not merely rival catalogues. Their response requires better metadata, contextual recommendations and active editorial curation. Bleuenn Le Goffic, VP business transformation at Accedo, says providers do not require Netflix-scale datasets to make meaningful improvements. Viewer information can be combined with rule-based personalisation and AI tools, providing audiences with the ability to experiment beyond established preferences.

“Reducing the friction of finding something to watch can have a big impact on engagement,” she explains. This can include improving search and optimising notification timing. The crucial enterprise capability is continuous experimentation: identifying a desired behaviour and measuring the result instead of treating personalisation as a one-off implementation.

Hybrid models demand an integrated platform

Streaming’s economic future is unlikely to be purely subscription-funded. Deloitte found that around 68% of US streaming subscribers paid for at least one ad-supported service in 2026, more than 20% higher than in 2024. The IAB projected that digital video would capture almost 60% of US television and video advertising expenditure in 2025, compared with 29% in 2020.

The distinction between SVOD, AVOD and FAST is consequently becoming less rigid. Providers can reserve premium programming for ad-free subscriptions, offer lower-priced advertising tiers, operate free channels for acquisition and bundle access through third parties. These models allow customers to downgrade, pause or change packages instead of leaving entirely. “Very few services now rely on a single revenue model,” Le Goffic says. “Hybrid strategies have become the norm.”

Paul Davies, head of marketing and partnerships at Yospace, tells FEED that ad-supported tiers can complement subscriptions by retaining less committed customers. Adding advertising, however, is not automatically profitable. Advertisers expect accurate measurement and reliable delivery, while audiences expect advertisements to play without buffering or disruption across live, on-demand and FAST content.

Advertising also exposes weaknesses in fragmented technology estates. Content management, customer experience, playback, billing and ad-tech platforms may work effectively in isolation but fail where data passes between them. The result can be repeated advertisements, poor frequency control, inconsistent personalisation and limited visibility of campaign outcomes.

Gabrielyan says this disconnect is one of the sector’s central challenges. “For the viewer, streaming is one experience across different services and devices. For advertisers, it remains a highly fragmented ecosystem of platforms, inventory and measurement systems.”

Enterprise OTT providers therefore need a shared data foundation that connects content intelligence, audience behaviour, service quality, advertising and customer support. It must enable decisions while there is still time to influence the experience: changing a recommendation, recovering a payment or correcting a playback fault.

Beyond peak streaming, growth will be won through thousands of better decisions: helping a customer discover a second programme, recovering a failed payment, surfacing value from an overlooked archive title and delivering advertising without damaging the viewing experience. Achieving this demands more than compelling content. It requires connected data and an organisation that can act on audience signals in real time.

The next generation of streaming leaders will not necessarily own the largest libraries or report the most accounts. They will be the platforms that recognise when a customer’s interest is weakening and adapt before that relationship is lost. Peak streaming is not the end of growth; it is the end of growth without discipline. In this more mature market, enduring success will belong to the businesses that can turn audience attention into sustained engagement and profitable relationships.

This article appeared in our IBC 2026 issue