Streaming Statistics 2026: Subscribers, Pricing, and Cord Cutting Data

On August 28, 2026, Apple raised the price of Apple TV+ to $14.99 a month. It was the service’s second increase in just over a year, up from $12.99 in August 2025, which itself had jumped 30% from $9.99 the year before that. In two years, the same subscription got 50% more expensive.

Apple isn’t an outlier here, it’s the pattern. Every major platform has raised prices at least once since 2025, several ad supported tiers now cost what an ad free plan cost two years ago, and the industry itself has quietly stopped answering the one question it used to lead every earnings call with: how many subscribers does it actually have.

Here’s what’s actually verifiable across pricing, subscribers, advertising, bundling, and cord cutting for streaming and OTT services in 2026, sourced to named research firms and each platform’s own disclosures, not recycled blog totals.

Netflix investor disclosure, Fortune, Nielsen’s The Gauge, Deloitte 2026 Digital Media Trends. Checked September 2026.

The Market Size Depends Entirely on What You Count

Ask how big the global streaming market actually is and two respected research firms will give you numbers nearly $93 billion apart, for the same year.

Grand View Research values the global video streaming market at $129.3 billion for 2024, growing to an estimated $191.1 billion by 2026. Statista, measuring a narrower slice of the same industry, puts global subscription video on demand revenue at $98.37 billion for 2026.

Grand View Research industry analysis; Statista SVOD segment forecast. Both checked September 2026.

Neither figure is wrong. The nearly $93 billion gap comes almost entirely from scope, not disagreement about growth, the same pattern that shows up whenever two firms measure the same industry with different category definitions.

What Streaming Actually Costs Without Cable in 2026

Subscribing to eight major streaming platforms with no ads and no bundle discounts costs $139.41 a month, or $1,672.92 a year, based on a Fortune calculation of published US list prices as of September 8, 2026. That figure covers Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, Max, and Prime Video.

Fortune’s own comparison is the detail that matters most here: a 2016 pay TV bill of $103.10 a month, adjusted for inflation, would run about $143 in July 2026, only around $4 more than the current ad free streaming total. Cord cutting no longer saves the money it once did once someone reassembles enough services to replace what cable offered.

Each platform’s published US ad free (or top ad free tier) list price, September 2026.

Netflix raised every tier at the end of March 2026: Standard with ads went to $8.99, Standard climbed to $19.99, and Premium reached $26.99. Paramount+ followed on January 15, 2026, moving its ad supported Essential plan to $8.99 and Premium to $13.99. Peacock raised prices twice in 2026 alone, most recently on August 18.

What’s changed since the last wave of increases isn’t the direction, prices have gone up every year since streaming became mainstream, it’s the size. A platform that used to add a dollar now adds two, and the ad supported tier that was supposed to be the budget option increasingly costs what an ad free plan cost eighteen months ago.

The Ad Supported Tier Stopped Being the Fallback Option

Ad supported streaming plans now account for 46% of all US premium subscription video accounts, up from 33% in 2023, according to industry tracking reported by StreamTV Insider in August 2026. North American ad supported tier revenue is on pace to exceed $45 billion for the year.

Share of US premium SVOD accounts by tier type, as reported by StreamTV Insider, August 2026, up from 33% ad supported in 2023.

Netflix disclosed more than 250 million global monthly active users on its ad tier as of May 2026, up from 190 million in November 2025 and 94 million a year earlier. In the countries where it’s available, the ad tier accounted for over 60% of all new Netflix sign ups in the first quarter of 2026, and 45% of US Netflix households now use it.

Disney reports similar behavior across Disney+ and Hulu, where its ad tier now represents more than 45% of new sign ups. Prime Video, bundled by default into most Amazon Prime memberships, has taken the opposite path: an estimated 88% of its subscribers watch with ads, and analysts project its US ad revenue will exceed $14 billion in 2026, making it one of the largest ad supported streaming businesses despite rarely being sold as a standalone plan.

The Real Growth Story Isn’t the US Ad Tier, It’s a Format That Doesn’t Charge At All

With 90% of US households already paying for at least one streaming service, most of the maneuvering covered above is about moving existing subscribers between tiers, not finding new ones. That’s not true everywhere. Media Partners Asia’s Asia Pacific Video and Broadband 2026 report projects the region’s total streaming revenue growing from $53.5 billion in 2025 to $74.4 billion by 2031.

Subscription video still leads that regional total, holding roughly 48.5% of revenue in 2025 per the same report. What Media Partners Asia flags as the region’s fastest growing format instead is FAST, free ad supported streaming television, channels a viewer never pays for at all, funded entirely by advertising. Growth is fastest specifically in the markets where paid subscriptions haven’t taken hold yet.

Platforms like Pluto TV, Tubi, and Samsung TV Plus don’t appear anywhere in the pricing comparison earlier in this article, because there’s no price to compare, and that’s exactly the point. The US story this year is tier migration inside a market that’s already close to full. The bigger structural growth story is regional, and it’s happening through a format the pricing and subscriber numbers above don’t capture at all.

What the Password Sharing Crackdown Actually Changed

Netflix began enforcing its password sharing crackdown in the US in May 2023, charging an extra fee for accounts used outside one household unless the primary account holder paid for an additional member. The first full quarter after the US rollout is still the clearest before and after data point the industry has.

In the quarter ending March 2024, Netflix added 9.33 million new memberships, more than double the 7.5 million it added in the same quarter a year prior. Revenue rose 15% to $9.4 billion and net income jumped 79% to $2.3 billion compared with the same period in 2023.

Analysts had estimated more than 100 million households were sharing a single Netflix account before the crackdown began. Converting even 10% to 20% of that group into paying members or additional member fees was enough, on its own, to move Netflix’s headline numbers more than any content release that year did.

The policy has since become standard across the industry rather than a one time event. It also carries a real, ongoing cost: search interest in piracy adjacent terms and conversation volume around unauthorized workarounds both rose sharply in the months immediately following the crackdown, a tradeoff platforms weighing similar moves have had to accept along with the revenue gain.

Streaming Now Accounts for Nearly Half of All TV Viewing

Streaming captured 47.5% of total US television viewing time in December 2025, a new record, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge, the industry’s most consistently cited measure of how Americans actually spend their TV time. That share has climbed steadily and specifically over the past eighteen months.

Nielsen’s The Gauge, monthly US TV usage share reports, June 2024 through December 2025.

Cable itself hasn’t disappeared. Leichtman Research Group counted just under 48 million US households still paying for traditional cable or satellite service as of the first quarter of 2025, down from a peak near 100 million in 2012. Pew Research separately found 36% of Americans still subscribe to some form of cable or satellite TV as of its July 2025 survey.

The decline has slowed compared with the sharper drops of 2020 through 2022, but it hasn’t reversed. Every research firm tracking the category agrees on the direction, even where they disagree on the exact household count.

Price parity with streaming hasn’t reversed that trend because the actual complaint about cable was never only the bill. A cancel anytime streaming stack still beats a two year cable contract on flexibility, even in a month where the total cost comes out roughly even, and once a household has already sold its cable box, going back involves a technician visit most people simply don’t bother scheduling.

Bundling Is Where Most New Subscriber Growth Now Comes From

Analysts at Parks Associates project that bundled subscriptions will account for essentially all subscription video growth in 2026, not because bundles are cheaper on paper, several cost close to the sum of their parts, but because they measurably keep subscribers longer.

Antenna’s subscription tracking found the cross company Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle retained 80% of subscribers three months after signup, based on a 2024 cohort. That beat every standalone alternative it measured: Netflix on its own retained 74%, Disney’s internal Disney+/Hulu bundle held 73%, and standalone Hulu and standalone Max each retained only 55% to 56%.

Antenna, three month retention by plan type, 2024 signup cohort, published in Antenna’s Q1 2025 State of Subscriptions report.

That gap, 80% versus 55%, is the actual business case for bundling, not the smaller monthly discount most marketing pages lead with. A subscriber who sticks around three months longer is worth far more than a two dollar signup discount, which is exactly why bundle deals work the way they do across categories well beyond streaming.

Subscription Fatigue Is Measurable, Not Just a Vibe

The average US household with a streaming subscription pays $69 a month across four services, according to Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey. Ninety percent of US households now carry at least one paid subscription video service, essentially universal at this point.

Deloitte’s data splits further by engagement level. Self described superfans spend $71 a month for an average of four services, while less engaged subscribers spend $56 a month for three, evidence that fandom, not just habit, is what keeps a household paying for more than the bare minimum.

Churn tells the other side of the story. Streaming services lose subscribers at an average monthly rate near 6.3%, or roughly 54% annually, per a 2026 benchmark study from retention analytics firm Retention Check, though the figure varies enormously by platform. Netflix’s own churn sits closer to 2% to 3% monthly, well below the industry average, largely a byproduct of its much larger content library and the sunk cost of years of viewing history and personalized recommendations.

Broader, non streaming specific habits still matter here too. Many of the same general tactics for cutting recurring costs apply just as directly to a stack of streaming subscriptions as they do to any other monthly bill.

The “325 Million Subscribers” Number Everyone Still Repeats Isn’t Current

Search for Netflix’s current subscriber count and most results will confidently state a number somewhere between 300 million and 375 million, often presented as a live 2026 figure. It isn’t, and the reason why is a genuine reporting change most of those articles skip entirely.

Netflix announced during its Q1 2024 earnings call that it would stop reporting quarterly subscriber counts beginning with its Q1 2025 results, shifting its stated focus to revenue, operating margin, and engagement instead. Co CEO Greg Peters said subscriber count had become “a decreasingly relevant measure” of the company’s health as advertising and extra member fees grew into real revenue streams of their own.

Netflix’s last officially disclosed figure was 301.63 million paying members, reported in January 2025 alongside its Q4 2024 results. Every number published since then, including the widely repeated “325 million,” traces back to third party analyst estimates from firms like Ampere Analysis, not a Netflix filing. Ampere itself estimated closer to 310 million by the end of Q1 2025, a meaningfully different number from the figure making the rounds.

Disney and Warner Bros Discovery have both since made similar moves, and Warner Bros Discovery’s own Discovery Plus subscriber numbers tell a comparable story: real growth, presented with far less quarterly precision than streaming reporting offered just two years ago. Treat any single point subscriber figure for a major 2026 streamer with the same caution you’d apply to any unsourced statistic, because in most cases, it is one.

None of this changes the broader direction covered above, prices are up, ad tiers dominate new signups, bundles retain better than standalone plans, and cable keeps losing ground to streaming. It just means the one number every article used to lead with is now the least reliable one in the entire industry, a pattern worth keeping in mind whenever a marketing driven statistic shows up without a named, dated source behind it.

Whatever the exact subscriber count turns out to be, the offers attached to these platforms change constantly. Current promotions across streaming and OTT services are tracked separately on CouponZania’s OTT category page, rather than restated here where they’d go stale within days.

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