Paramount Global's so-called "Mountain of Entertainment" has experienced some erosion. 

As the major media conglomerates follow a lead set by Warner Bros. Discovery, trimming back their subscription streaming platforms of content to reduce costs, Paramount Plus has seen a 64% reduction in its film catalog over the past 12 months. 

According to an audit conducted by streaming consumer-search and business analytics company Reelgood, Paramount Plus had 830 movie titles available for streaming on Oct. 15, fewer than half of the 2,302 it had on October 17, 2021.

At 752 TV series, Paramount Plus' TV show catalog was largely flat -- up 3% year over year. 

The austere trim in movie titles comes after Paramount CFO Naveen Chopra said in August that the company aims to plan the Paramount Plus slate more "efficiently," getting away from what he called a "volume focused game."

Chopra added, “Our programming slate is designed to ensure that each key audience segment has compelling content to enjoy throughout the year. Not too little, but also not too much.”

It's hard to argue with Paramount's strategy, with revenue from direct-to-consumer services surging 38% in the third quarter, while streaming subscribers grew by 2.7 million to reach 63 million users.

Reelgood's audit, meanwhile, counted a 15% year-over-year reduction in movie titles for Max, with the parent company famously ditching movie titles including Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme before even releasing them to reduce costs on its balance sheet. 

However, with the influx of Discovery series moving under the Max umbrella amid the transition from the erstwhile HBO Max, the platform's TV show catalog doubled to 1,365 titles, according to Reelgood. 

While some SVOD catalogs are expanding, NBCUniversal keeps expanding Peacock's overall catalog, which has tripled in size over the past two years. Perhaps relatedly, Peacock's paid user base has tripled, too, to 30 million subscribers as of the end of September. 

Netflix said when it launched its discounted "Basic with Ads" tier back on Nov. 3 that due to still-being-worked-out licensing restrictions, less than 10% of its acquired TV shows and movies would be restricted from the new service offering. 

An audit conducted by Reelgood confirms that only around 6% of the 4,013 acquired movies on Netflix, and only 5% of the 2,342 licensed TV shows in the library are unavailable on the $6.99 ad-subsidized tier. 

Also read: Only 9% of New Netflix Signups Are for 'Basic with Ads'

However, perhaps explaining the sluggish early uptake of Netflix with Ads: Some of the early omissions are notable. 

For example, the Sony-distributed, Reese Witherspoon-produced adaptation of Delia Owens murder-mystery novel Where the Crawdads Sing was the seventh most popular show in U.S. subscription streaming the week it debuted on Netflix on Nov. 12.

But Crawdads, which grew its audience to become the third most popular SVOD program in the U.S. the following week with 1.09 billion viewing minutes, didn't sing on Basic with Ads, which was restricted from the movie based on licensing terms. 

Also that same week of Nov. 14-20, DreamWorks Animation's toon comedy The Bad Guys was the seventh most popular SVOD movie in the U.S., but was similarly unavailable on Netflix's Basic with Ads tier. 

As Reelgood added, other notable movie omissions on the new tier include Uncharted, R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned, Sniper: Rogue Mission and Bullet Train. The latter, an action-thriller starring Brad Pitt, has ranked in the top 5 for English-language films on Netflix for the past three weeks. 

Meanwhile, among licensed TV series, notable Basic with Ads omissions include The Walking Dead, Peaky Blinders, The Last King, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, New Girl and The Sinner.

As the major subscription streaming services deal with their first recessionary economy, one of the dynamics being closely observed is Neflix's "binge" release model. 

Will Netflix stop swimming against the SVOD industry tide and start staggering its original-series releases like its rivals, most of which drop new individual episodes on a weekly basis?

There's reason to suspect that I hybridized approach recently plied by Netflix to the fourth seasons of Ozark and Stranger Things might be how the still-very-much No. 1 SVOD service approaches its future distribution strategy. 

Reelgood provides a mobile app that helps users find out where they can stream a specific show. The startup says it arbitrates the streaming decisions of 5 million users. 

We typically haven't found Reelgood's weekly series rankings based on its referrals all that useful. For instance, the startup ranked Hulu's The Old Man No. 1 in overall U.S. viewership for the week of June 16-22. 

We're riveted by the spy thriller starring Jeff Bridges alongside John Lithgow. But we find it hard to believe that it was streamed by more people than Netflix's Stranger Things, which was the top show that same week on a platform with over 30 million more customers, a massive series hit that didn't even appear in Reelgood's top 10 ranker. 

Still, Reelgood's rankings do provide a good indicator of what consumers are searching for at any given time. 

Take this chart, for example:

Reelgood's chart shows that from January 1 through May 15, the Paramount Global hit Yellowstone, provided as a U.S. SVOD exclusive to NBCU's Peacock in what has to be the Shortsighted Distribution Deal of the Century, was perhaps the most searched-for series on Reelgood. It ranked on the app's top 20 most queried series for 18 consecutive weeks.

Perhaps streaming consumers, as confused as we initially were when we couldn't find producer Taylor Sheridan's surprise modern-day Western sensation on Paramount Plus, were turning to Reelgood in droves to track Yellowstone down?

As for Netflix's binge model? We found this notable:

Over that four-and-a-half-month span covered in the chart, Shonda Rhimes had two mega-hits on Netflix -- the limited series smash Inventing Anna, along with the second season of Bridgerton. These shows produced some of Netflix's biggest audiences ever. And they were undoubtedly watched more than any of the other series appearing on Reelgood's chart, including Yellowstone. 

However, the period of search engagement for these shows appears to be limited, with Inventing Anna ranking in the top 20 for Reelgood searches for only five consecutive weeks, and Bridgerton appearing for only four straight weeks. 

It could be argued that folks generally know where to find Netflix shows like Bridgerton, and they don't need a mobile app like Reelgood to find them as they would for say a show with a convoluted corporate release strategy, like Yellowstone. 

But here's what we find interesting:

Ozark, another well-known and popular Netflix original series, but one not nearly as big as Bridgerton, stayed in the Reelgood public consciousness for nearly twice as long as the Rhimes-created period drama -- seven straight weeks. 

Notably, while Netflix released all Season 2 episodes of Bridgerton on March 25, it split the 14-episode fourth season of Ozark in two, releasing seven installments on January 21, and the final seven on April 29.

The timeline of Reelgood's chart doesn't account for Season 4 of Stranger Things, which was also released in two stages -- seven episodes dropping on May 27, and the final two super-sized installments on July 1. 

But as the more than 300 million streaming hours (according to Netflix) of the show consumed last week clearly demonstrates, user engagement in Stranger Things has not ebbed much in the course of over a month. 

Netflix, struggling to defend long-held dogma including its all-at-once release strategy amid a suddenly sour and second-guessing investor climate, doesn't appear to be ready to abandon the binge outright. 

“We fundamentally believe that we want to give our members the choice in how they view,” said Peter Friedlander, speaking at a June Hollywood function. 

But logic dictates that in a more scrutinized era, Netflix is looking to expand the engagement impact of each of the 17 billion dollars it spends on content this year. It stands to reason that we might see more shows released in a pattern similar to Ozark and Stranger Things, which seem to satisfy the bingeful needs of customers while also delivering the sustained "platform engagement" called for by the business model.

"We have had some experimentation in that space," Friedlander conceded. "But it’s also, you’re giving multiple-episodic-viewing experiences, it isn’t a standalone. So it really does, what we think, honors our relationship with our members and what their expectations are.”

Streaming guide Reelgood has named Tim Cutting general manager of commercial. In this role, he will continue Reelgood's mission of helping consumers find content across multiple streaming platforms.

He joins Reelgood from Gracenote, where he was head of North American sales. At Gracenote, he led their broadcast TV expansion into new markets. Similarly, he will be helping global customers adapt to streaming TV with Reelgood.

"Tim has been at the forefront of innovation in TV data, which is why we're thrilled to work with him to own this new revolution in TV, which is solving streaming fragmentation for our clients," said David Sanderson, founder & CEO of Reelgood.

"What excites me about Reelgood is that they are solving the streaming data problem with a content-first mindset," said Cutting. "People are no longer tuning into a channel; they are tuning into content–be it Netflix or HBO Max or Disney Plus–that is changing by the minute." ■ 

Warner Bros. Pictures' latest adaptation of sci-fi classic Dune had the biggest home streaming opening weekend of any day-and-date theatrical title this year, according to data released by Reelgood.

Debuting Friday on HBO Max, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi opus accounted for 12% of 2 million searches measured by Reelgood.com, which directs users to the appropriate platform to find the movie or TV show they're searching for. 

According to Reelgood's technique, which measures the percentage of streams arbitrated from Friday through Sunday on a cross-sample of 2 million referrals, Dune performed significantly better than the previous best day-and-date opening, HBO Max's premiere of The Suicide Squad back in early August.

Dune coupled its HBO Max release with a successful domestic box office debut, totaling $40.1 million in 4,125 North American theaters, and already surpassing filmmaker David Lynch's confounding 1984 adaptation of Dune. 

Villeneuve's Dune arrived in theaters with new COVID-19 cases falling fast, and critics collectively scoring it at a solid 83%, according to aggregation platform Rotten Tomatoes. 

WarnerMedia announced late last year that all 17 films in the 2021 Warner Bros. Pictures theatrical slate would be released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max.

Gone are the days when the major U.S. SVOD services pretty much licensed all of the same movies and TV shows, and were only differentiated by a few original series.

These days, the major media conglomerates are keeping their content in house for their own subscription streaming services. There are a lot more original shows. And services are, for the most part, unique.

This is elegantly showcased by two graphics assembled by streaming content navigation portal Reelgood.

In terms of TV shows, Hulu and Peacock have the most overlap, sharing 21% of their catalog. This probably isn't surprising, since Comcast's NBCUniversal unit is a 30% non-controlling stakeholder in Hulu, and completely owns Peacock.

In terms of movies, Hulu and Paramount Plus have the most in common, sharing 15% of their respective catalogs.

Notably, Disney Plus is the most "unique" among all the services, sharing only a fraction (7%) of its TV catalog with Hulu, which its parent company majority owns. 

Streaming services decided to add more reality show content to their programming mix in the first quarter, according to a services to their mix, according to a study by Reelgood.

Reelgood said the increase in the number of reality TV shows on the streaming services it tracks nearly doubled, jumping by 92% from the fourth quarter.

Philo added the most reality shows for the second-consecutive quarter. Hulu added the second most in the quarter, moving up from fourth last quarter. Listed as popular reality series on Hulu were Shark Tank, Bad Girls Club, The Masked Singer, The Voice and Keeping Up with the Karadashians. Bravo’s Keeping Up with the Karadashians is ending after 14 years, but the family will be doing a new, original show for Hulu.

Amazon Prime was third, moving up from sixth. Netflix was fourth, down one slot. Top Netflix reality show including The Great British Baking Show, Jeopardy, Survivor, Selling Sunset and Queer Eye.

The study also found that Netflix continued to be the leader in adding original shows in the first quarter. It was followed by HBO Max and Amazon Prime, which were also second and third in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Disney Plus jumped up to the No. 4 position, jumping over Hulu and HBO. 

“As the battle for dominance intensifies in the streaming space, it’s become increasingly clear that unique and exclusive content is the key to success,” the Reelgood report said. “Newcomer Discovery Plus immediately surged to the ninth spot in the ranking for the most original TV show and episode adds while the big three are still Netflix, HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video.”

Declining broadcast TV ratings and the polarizing impact of the Cancel Culture movement have certainly hurt Hollywood’s Awards Show Industrial Complex of late. 

But new research from Reelgood suggests that the decreasingly popular Academy Awards and the embattled Golden Globes still give their respective top contenders a significant audience boost when it comes to next-day streaming. 

Reelgood, which directs users to the various streaming platforms to find the shows and movies they’re searching for, found that Nomadland received nearly a 3X audience boost on Hulu immediately after the evening of Feb. 28, when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) named the film the winner of its Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Drama, while also awarding the film's creative mastermind, Chloé Zhao, Golden Globes for best directing and screenwriting. 

Nomadland received a much bigger audience boost right after April 25, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarded the movie the Oscar for Best Picture, while also recognizing Zhao and star Frances McDormand. This time, the audience, across Hulu and transactional services, increased by a factor of more than 4X (see chart below).

Reelgood found similarly corresponding audience increases for Netflix awards contenders Mank and The Trial of the Chicago 7, tied to the not just to the actual Golden Globes and Oscar presentations, but also the Oscar nominations. 

TV shows also get a boost from awards, Reelgood said. Apple TV Plus hit Ted Lasso, which won Golden Globes for Best TV Series - Comedy or Musical, as well as a Best Actor in a TV Series Golden Globe for star Jason Sudeikis, received a 2.1X day-after-ceremony audience bump. 

The data, which Reelgood said is based over 2 million user streams, comes as Hollywood’s annual awards rituals are under increasing existential threat. 

ABC’s presentation of the 93rd Annual Academy Awards last month were watched by just 9.85 million viewers, while garnering an anemic 1.9 rating among adults 18-49, an all-time low for an event that generated Super Bowl-liked TV audience numbers not too long ago. 

Meanwhile, the HFPA—an organization with obvious flaws that were overlooked by entertainment industry for decades—has come under heightened criticism, not only for an alleged lack of organizational diversity, but also for the behavior of some of its members. 

NBC, which has long televised the Golden Globes event, said it won’t present the awards telecast next year. 

Eighty-nine percent of the content found on Disney Plus can’t be watched on any other subscription or ad-supported video-on-demand service, an analysis conducted by Reelgood found. 

Disney Plus’ purity leads even Netflix, which boasts that 83% of its catalog is exclusive to the platform. 

Here’s how the major SVOD services stack up in terms of exclusive movies and shows:

Reelgood also found that 39% of Netflix’s TV catalog is now original series, up from 25% a year ago. Notably, while HBO Max has 31% more originals than legacy service HBO Now did in January 2020, it also has far more licensed shows—330 vs. 40. So, overall, HBO Max’s TV catalog is only 37% comprised of original series vs. 78% for the legacy service. 

The Office, which was the top show on a streaming service with more than 73 million U.S. subscribers until New Year’s Day, is now even more popular on a platform with only around 26 million active users.

That’s Reelgood’s story, and it’s sticking with it. 

The company, which specializes in directing viewers to the shows they want to stream, said that nearly 10% of the streams delivered for a cohort of 2 million-plus users on the week of Jan. 1-7 went to The Office on Peacock. The show premiered exclusively on Peacock Jan. 1.

According to Nielsen, The Office was Netflix’s most watched show for the week of Dec. 14-20, with all 192 episodes attracting around 1.311 billion minutes of viewing on the No. 1 U.S. SVOD platform. 

Also read: Is 'The Office' Now Driving Peacock's Business Model?

But according to Reelgood, for that week, The Office only accounted for less than 3% of the cohort’s Reelgood-arbitrated streams that week. 

Despite the popularity on The Office on its platform, Netflix didn’t exactly go out of its way to surface the show in the waning weeks before it bolted to a competitor. NBCU, which paid more than $100 million pocket-to-pocket for exclusive domestic streaming rights, has made The Office a key component of Peacock promotion. 

But still … the discrepancy seems hard to fathom.

"The continued popularity of The Office says more about the content than the service that's streaming it," observes Dietrich von Behren, Reelgood's chief business officer for Reelgood. "People will follow the programs they love and also subscribe to an additional service for new must-see shows. By offering the first few seasons of The Office on their free tier, Peacock was very strategic—creating excitement by enticing existing fans and newbies alike, which surely helped promote their debut and drive new subscribers."

The Office, the most popular show in streaming, increased viewing as it moved from Netflix to Peacock and is maintaining its share of streaming two weeks after the transfer, according to data from Reelgood.

Netflix subscribers, aware that the show would be leaving, increased their viewing of the former NBC sitcom leading up to Jan 1. Viewing continued to rise from Jan. 1 to Jan. 7 on NBCU's Peacock, reaching a peak 9.2% share.

The Office was the No. 1 show on Reelgood's list of the top 100 most-watched TV shows for that week, beating out Netflix’s Bridgerton and The Mandalorian on Disney Plus.

Also Read: Is 'The Office' Now Driving Peacock's Business Model?

Since then, viewing has fallen but is still well above the rates it had on Netflix mid-way through December, according to Reelgood. 

“The level of viewing activity for The Office seems to have slowed to more sustainable levels, but it's good news for NBC that the series seems to be living up to its potential for now,” Reelgood said. 

Peacock appears to be getting a boost from Michael Scott and company. The number of users with Peacock Free selected as one of their subscription services via Reelgood grew by 17% during the week of Jan. 8 vs the week of Dec. 25. The number of Reelgood users with Peacock Premium as a streaming service grew by 5% within the same timeframe.

Upstart subscription streaming services Disney Plus and HBO Max are indeed taking market share away from the incumbent SVOD giants Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, Reelgood reported, but it’s HBO Max that’s actually getting a bigger portion of the pie.

Reelgood, which aims to direct streaming video users where to go to find the content they want, cross-sectioned 2 million users streams in the third and fourth quarters. The San Francisco company found that the share of streams for both Netflix and Amazon Prime dropped from Q3 to Q4—from 25% to 22% for Netflix, and from 22% to 20% for Amazon. 

Notably, HBO Max’s share of streams shot up from 9% in Q3 to 12% in Q4. And Disney Plus’s share increased from 5% in Q3 to 6% in Q4. Hulu stayed flat at 15%.

So HBO Max and Disney Plus are both growing market share at the expense of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Fine. But here’s what surprised us: HBO Max controlled twice as many streams as Disney Plus in Q4? 

Isn't Disney Plus, like, way bigger?

Disney Plus reported 86.6 million global subscribers in early December. About 30% of them are driven by Hotstar in India, and a big chunk of that number also comes from Europe. While a precise U.S. tally for Disney Plus wasn’t announced, it would seem safe to assume that the service’s domestic ranks outpace HBO Max, which reported 12.6 million users, also as of early December. 

HBO has around 38 million total users in the U.S., and 57 million globally. 

“Disney Plus does have far more subscribers than HBO Max,” a Reelgood rep conceded. “What we see in our VOD Viewing Insights dashboard is that Disney Plus subscribers are less engaged with the service than HBO subscribers are with HBO Max.”

The rep noted that HBO Max released 47% more new movies and TV shows than Disney Plus did in 2020. And as of Dec. 15, HBO Max had 1,300 more titles. 

In the bowels of a database in Los Gatos, Calif. lies a definitive ranking of the most viewed shows on Netflix so far this year.

The rest of us have to rely on our own methodologies. 

For its part, streaming service aggregation platform provider Reelgood tallied up each and every “Top 10 in the U.S.” ranking Netflix published from Feb. 27 - Dec. 9. The Office finished No.1 with a bullet, appearing on the list 178 times.

The only show to come close is kids seriesd CoComelon, which appeared in the rankings 104 times.

Notably, Nielsen, which started in the late summer publishing a weekly third-party ranker of the top SVOD titles based on total viewing minutes, seems to concur, with The Office consistently ranked among the top shows each week.

Regrettably for Netflix, on Jan. 1, The Office starts streaming exclusively on Peacock, which paid $500 million to acquire those rights. 

The entry of new subscription streaming alternatives appears to be eroding the dominance of the top SVOD gorilla, Netflix, according to the latest research released by streaming services and analysis company Reelgood.

Reelgood’s platform acts as a recommendation hub for a wide swath of subscription streaming sites, directing 2 million active users monthly to the various platforms . And in the third quarter, Reelgood initiated 22% fewer streams for Netflix than it did in Q2.

According to San Francisco startup, Netflix accounted for 32% of its initiated streams in the second quarter, but only 25% in Q3.

Hulu also saw a decline in its dominance, dropping from a 19% of Reelgood-directed streams in Q2 to 15% in Q3. (Amazon Prime Video and Disney Plus remained largely flat from Q2 - Q3.)

So where did Netflix and Hulu’s lost market share go?

Well, HBO Max—which had its first full quarter in the market in Q3—saw its share of streams double from 3% to 6%. 

And while Reelgood’s latest report and associated graphic (see below) don’t include data for Comcast/NBCUniversal’s Peacock, a Reelgood rep said that new platform’s emergence was certainly a factor. 

Reelgood’s latest report also further supported the narrative that ad-supported, free streaming services are cutting into SVOD. The latter’s market share was down from 52.3% in Q2 to 47.5% of streams in Q3, while AVOD’s share spiked from 25% to 30.8%.

Notably, TV Everywhere streams declined from 11.7% in Q2 to 8.4% in Q3. 

If the streaming wars were a reality series, they’d be more like The Bachelor than Survivor. 

As the chart provided by streaming aggregation service provider Reelgood shows below, Netflix is clearly “the bachelor.” It’s not competing with potential replacements so much as being complimented by potential suitors. 

A sizable majority of U.S. users for every other major SVOD service also subscribes to Netflix, with Amazon Prime Video and Hulu having the lowest percentage at 86% of their respective customer bases. Fully 91% of those who use Apple TV Plus and Peacock also subscribe to the No. 1 SVOD service. 

But with Netflix serving nearly 73 million U.S. subscribers, it’s important to note that the relationship with its rivals is not reciprocal. According to Reelgood, 65% of U.S. Netflix users also subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. But that’s as high a confluence as there is for the Netflix base. Only 13% of Netflix users also pay for HBO Max, for example. 

Reelgood, which provides a centralized hub for users to search for streaming content across services on iOS and Android devices, based the chart below on more than 2 million streaming media consumers through August 15. 

Based on iOS streams directed through its aggregation portal during the first two weeks on the market for the recent major SVOD launches, Reelgood says the free, ad-supported version of Peacock was more popular than Disney Plus, HBO Max and Apple TV Plus during their first respective 14 days in play.

In the chart below, Reelgood doesn't include usage numbers, but it defines usage of the paid, subscription version of Peacock as the minimum baseline--1x. 

That means that at "8.8x," free Peacock garnered nearly nine times as much usage as Peacock Premium from July 17-30. 

Notably, at 8.7 times as much usage as Peacock Premium, HBO Max also exceeded the boffo launch of Disney Plus (7x).

Based on iOS streams initiated by Peacock, nearly 90% of streams are going to the free service.

Among users of the legacy HBO Now app just before the launch of the new, broader HBO Max service, 29% are still using the older application.

The data comes courtesy of streaming analytics/consumer guide service provider Reelgood, which compared a cohort of of HBO Now users’ activity in the two weeks before the May 27 HBO Max launch to their HBO activity in the two weeks after. In those 14 post launch days, 29% were still using the legacy app to access HBO programming.

Reelgood said it connected data from 2 million U.S. active users, based on 32 million interactions with the Reelgood recommendation platform.

Notably, legacy HBO Now users have every incentive to upgrade--they get a lot more content for the same $14.99 a month with HBO Max. And AT&T and its WarnerMedia division have not been able to reach distribution terms with the two biggest connected TV operating system companies, Roku and Amazon.

As Variety stated in a pretty compelling deep dive into those impasses, they have likely “stunted” the uptake of the new HBO Max service.

For now, users of OTT devices powered by Roku and Amazon Fire TV only have access to the legacy HBO Now app, which will be renamed as simply “HBO” after July 31.

Also after July 31, as Variety noted, Amazon Fire TV’s distribution deal for that legacy app expires. So if no agreement between WarnerMedia and Amazon is reached by that time, Fire TV users will have no access to HBO at all.

Adding to the drama: Comcast and NBCUniversal’s big contribution to the streaming wars, Peacock, is set to expand its rollout Wednesday over the open internet, also without Roku and Amazon support.

Also read: Google and Android TV Threaten Roku and Amazon for Connected TV Dominance

Research company Conviva said in a recent report that 44% of connected TV usage in the U.S. occurs over Roku-powered devices, while 19% happens on Fire TV gadgets.

As Variety also noted, the impasses with WarnerMedia and NBCU have less to do with subscription revenue sharing and more to do with things like disaggregation of HBO Max and Peacock services in the respective platforms’ “channels” stores, as well as how advertising revenue is split.

Among users of the legacy HBO Now app just before the launch of the new, broader HBO Max service, 29% are still using the older application.

The data comes courtesy of streaming analytics/consumer guide service provider Reelgood, which compared a cohort of of HBO Now users’ activity in the two weeks before the May 27 HBO Max launch to their HBO activity in the two weeks after. In those 14 post launch days, 29% were still using the legacy app to access HBO programming.

Reelgood said it connected data from 2 million U.S. active users, based on 32 million interactions with the Reelgood recommendation platform.

Notably, legacy HBO Now users have every incentive to upgrade--they get a lot more content for the same $14.99 a month with HBO Max. And AT&T and its WarnerMedia division have not been able to reach distribution terms with the two biggest connected TV operating system companies, Roku and Amazon.

As Variety stated in a pretty compelling deep dive into those impasses, they have likely “stunted” the uptake of the new HBO Max service.

For now, users of OTT devices powered by Roku and Amazon Fire TV only have access to the legacy HBO Now app, which will be renamed as simply “HBO” after July 31.

Also after July 31, as Variety noted, Amazon Fire TV’s distribution deal for that legacy app expires. So if no agreement between WarnerMedia and Amazon is reached by that time, Fire TV users will have no access to HBO at all.

Adding to the drama: Comcast and NBCUniversal’s big contribution to the streaming wars, Peacock, is set to expand its rollout Wednesday over the open internet, also without Roku and Amazon support.

Also read: Google and Android TV Threaten Roku and Amazon for Connected TV Dominance

Research company Conviva said in a recent report that 44% of connected TV usage in the U.S. occurs over Roku-powered devices, while 19% happens on Fire TV gadgets. 

As Variety also noted, the impasses with WarnerMedia and NBCU have less to do with subscription revenue sharing and more to do with things like disaggregation of HBO Max and Peacock services in the respective platforms’ “channels” stores, as well as how advertising revenue is split.

Reelgood has taken its streaming aggregation app into the living room for the first time, launching iterations for Android TV, Amazon Fire TV and LG smart TVs. 

San Francisco-based startup Reelgood has for several years operated an app for iOS and Android mobile devices that lets you check off every major streaming service you use, then enables you to search and access your programming all in one app. 

The app can be accessed on this page. 

A number of video technology companies have been developing this kind of convenience—the new TiVo Stream 4K dongle, for example, offers the same all-in-one capability. Reelgood, however, works across a far bigger range of devices. 

“Our TV app supports every streaming service in the US, including Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, [Amazon ]Prime, [Apple] TV Plus HBO Max, Showtime, Crunchyroll, and hundreds of others,” Reelgood marketing chief Catharine Burhenne told Next TV. 

Backed by $11 million in VC funding, Reelgood provides its app free to consumers but is hoping to drive revenue based on data and insights--an endeavor that will undoubtedly be accentuated by entry into major OTT device ecosystems.

Reelgood tracks the 20 top shows users are streaming for the first time

With viewers stuck at home and tryout new shows for the very first time, the Netflix original series Ozark leads the OTT universe in quarantine period series sampling, according to new data released by Reelgood. 

For the period of March 16 - April 26, the San Francisco streaming business research company counted millions of “tracks”—defined as measurement markers, created when a streaming video user watches a show for the first time.

With season three of Ozark, a drama starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, posting on Netflix March 27, Reelgood said the show controlled 8.59% of all tracks during the 40-day period, followed closely by eight-part Netflix documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. 

Here’s Reelgood’s full top 20 for tracks during the quarantine:

While the pandemic-fueled rise of subscription streaming has been pretty well documented, it turns out that ad-supported streaming is doing pretty alright, as well.

According to Reelgood, which tracks the patterns of more than 4 million U.S. streaming video consumers, streams initiated on video-on-demand (AVOD) platforms were up 148% in the first week of April, compared to the first week of March, right before the majority of folks were quarantined in their homes. 

Tubi, the AVOD service just purchased by Fox Corp., controls the biggest market share among ad-supported streaming services at 25.16%, according to Reelgood’s measurement from March 2 - April 19, followed by Sony Crackle (12.04%) and Amazon’s IMDb TV (11.45%). 

The lion’s share of AVOD consumption belongs to the aggregated “other” category (37.29%), which a Reelgood rep includes the free streaming offerings of local broadcast stations and many other fragments of the ad-supported OTT business. 

Notably, when slicing up market share in the combined AVOD and SVOD world, Tubi actually ranks fifth with a  3.8% market share, ahead of Apple TV Plus and HBO Now. 

No. 1 Netflix controls 43.2% of all streams.

Despite its stellar launch and gobs of promotion, Disney Plus still controlled less than 5% of the streams initiated in the U.S. during the high-usage social distancing period of March 16 - April 5, according to data supplied by research company Reelgood. 

In fact, the chart below could have represented the pre-COVID-19 market of a year ago—or even two or three years ago. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu still control over 80 of initiated streams. 

The chart shows lays bare the challenge faced not only by Disney Plus, but also by Apple TV Plus, Quibi, HBO Max and Peacock, as each of these recently launched or about to launch services tries to make a dent in the global OTT market. Apple TV Plus, which has been in the market for over five months, still controls less than 2% of initiated streams. 

San Francisco-based Reelgood has more than 2 million users., who access its database to navigate the video streaming market. The company anonymously tracks the number of streams that are initiated through its platform. 

U.S. streaming service users who subscribe to both Netflix and Disney Plus watch the former more than three times as much as they do the Walt Disney Company’s new SVOD service.

This is according to Reelgood, a San Francisco startup focused on helping consumers navigate the complexities of OTT distribution. Reelgood has been building out its industry research and data capabilities recently.

Reelgood found that, out of a sample size of about 45,000 users, out of total time spent streaming movies and shows on either Netflix or Disney Plus since the latter launched Nov. 12, 74.8% of that time was spent on Netflix. 

Also read: Netflix's Library Through the Years

Disney announced that Disney Plus surged to 28.6 million subscribers, primarily in the U.S. and Canada, just a few months after its November 12 launch. However, the platform has only a narrow selection of family-friendly original shows, along with a significant but finite library of classic and popular movies and shows. 

Also read: Disney Plus: How It Went From Zero to 28.6 Million in Less Than Three Months

It's widely understood that Netflix's subscription streaming platform has evolved from a OTT destination packed mostly with licensed movies from the major studios, into one with a much smaller, more refined content mix, far more influenced by original content and TV series. 

Reelgood, a San Francisco startup focused on helping consumers navigate the complexities of OTT distribution, has been building out its industry research and data capabilities recently. And the company shared some interesting data sets detailing the evolution of the Netflix content makeup over the last decade. 

First comes an obvious one: The company rightly anticipated nearly a decade back that the major studios would eventually cut off their content pipelines and start building their own means of streaming production.  

In 2013, the year Netflix first started producing its own movies and shows, it had only eight original titles out of a total library of around 9,000 titles. This year, Netflix will generate more than 1,100 originals, Reelgood tabulated, out of a total library of just 5,845 movies and TV shows. 

Also notable has been the decline of movies, specifically licensed titles, in the Netflix content mix. Reelgood counted 6,755 licensed movie titles in 2010. This year, there will be only 3,732 movies available on the platform, according to Reelgood, and 525 of them will be originals.

Corresponding with the decline in movie titles on Netflix has been an increase in licensed and original TV shows. There were only 530 TV titles available on Netflix in 2010. There are nearly four times that in 2020 (Reelgood counts 2,110), with 576 being original series. 

Decider, the platform launched by News Corp’s New York Post five years ago to help readers better navigate the expanding ocean of streaming video choices, has partnered with Reelgood to embed the Silicon Valley start-up's guide widget in its reviews. 

Terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed. Mark Graham, editor-in-chief of Decider, said his company is basically licensing Reelgood’s technology.

And it’s essentially a marriage of two companies chasing the same objective, but doing it from different angles. According to Graham, Decider bills itself as a “human antidote to the algorithms,” serving as an editorially-driven, review-oriented alternative to Netflix-style search and recommendation. 

Related: Reelgood Raises $6.75M in Series A Funding

For its part, San Francisco startup Reelgood also bills itself as a lighthouse amid the exploding universe of on-demand choice TV consumers face in the cord-cutting era. However, Reelgood approaches the problem from an entirely technological perspective. 

“It’s the worst feeling in the world to have spent $4.99 on Amazon to stream something when it was part of your Hulu subscription all along, and you didn’t know it,” said Graham. 

Starting last week, if you click on any of the 15,000 movies or TV shows that Decider has collected data on, you’ll see at the bottom a Reelgood widget, which features all the various SVOD, AVOD and transactional platforms where the content can be found, including links. 

Previously, Decider provided a somewhat similar widget to its readers that was powered by another streaming video aggregation platform, GoWatchIt.

Graham said Decider first met with ReelGood’s team 18 months ago. In August, it began working with Reelgood’s engineers to build an API that would work with Decider’s WordPress-based publishing backbone. 

These are heady times for both companies. 

Reelgood just secured another $6.75 million in Series A funding from Runa Capital with participation from August Capital.

Decider more than doubled its traffic in November, tallying 9.14 million unique users compared to 4.46 million in November 2018. 

Graham attributes the growth to the rise in mainstream consumer interest in video streaming—a spike he believes that is directly related to the entry of Disney+, HBO Max and Peacock into the market. 

Reelgood, which tracks what movies and TV shows are available across a vast expanse of more than 330 streaming platforms, just secured another $6.75 million in Series A funding.

The investment round, secured from Runa Capital with participation from August Capital, brings the San Francisco-based start-ups total funding to around $11 million. It was launched in 2016 with $4.3 million in seed money.

Reelgood regularly ingests massive amounts of data pertaining to service content libraries into a database, processing it with a combination of machine learning and human curators.

The result not only allows a user base of around 10 million consumers to punch in movie and show titles into an app on their iPhone or Android mobile device to see where it can be found in the streaming world, it also has plenty of value in the business-to-business world.

For example, Reelgood says that Roku, Microsoft, the New York Post and hedge funds are among those that license its data insights. This data helps these companies understand how OTT platforms and their content libraries are performing, as well as what’s attracting consumer interest.

Earlier this year, Reelgood hired Nielsen’s former senior VP of global measurement, Mark Green, to lead a division, which it calls Reelgood Insights.

“I sought out and joined Reelgood because they are poised to capture the billions in revenue spent on viewership data as viewing continues to shift towards OTT,” Green said in a statement. 

Reelgood, which tracks what movies and TV shows are available across a vast expanse of more than 330 streaming platforms, just secured another $6.75 million in Series A funding.

The investment round, secured from Runa Capital with participation from August Capital, brings the San Francisco-based start-ups total funding to around $11 million. It was launched in 2016 with $4.3 million in seed money. 

Reelgood regularly ingests massive amounts of data pertaining to service content libraries into a database, processing it with a combination of machine learning and human curators. 

The result not only allows a user base of around 10 million consumers to punch in movie and show titles into an app on their iPhone or Android mobile device to see where it can be found in the streaming world, it also has plenty of value in the business-to-business world. 

For example, Reelgood says that Roku, Microsoft, the New York Post and hedge funds are among those that license its data insights. This data helps these companies understand how OTT platforms and their content libraries are performing, as well as what’s attracting consumer interest.

Earlier this year, Reelgood hired Nielsen’s former senior VP of global measurement, Mark Green, to lead a division, which it calls Reelgood Insights.

“I sought out and joined Reelgood because they are poised to capture the billions in revenue spent on viewership data as viewing continues to shift towards OTT,” Green said in a statement.