Report: Disney Passes Netflix’s Share of Popular Streaming Titles; Netflix Originals Highest Still in Demand

The saturation and fragmentation of the streaming market has been well documented. Customers are being forced to pick and choose which services they’ll keep and which to let go of, and content is a big factor in making that determination.

New research by Ampere Analysis is shining a light on which services customers think of as having superior content, and it’s not great news for Netflix. According to Ampere, Netflix has been surpassed by the Disney+/Hulu bundle in terms of being the home of the most desirable films and series.

Ampere’s numbers show that the bundle hosts 38% of the top-100 subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) titles in the U.S., compared to 28% for Netflix. In 2015, Netflix claimed 72% of the top-100 domestic titles, which demonstrates just how saturated the streaming market has become in the past seven years.

Life was a lot easier for Netflix when its only real competitors in the streaming world were HBO Max and Prime Video. Now, 18 different platforms have at least one title within the top 100 and a dozen platforms have at least 10 million subscribers. In 2015, only Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu could lay claim to that many customers.

Part of the reason for Netflix’s decline in market share is the dispersal of some of its most popular content.

Of the 50 highest-demand SVOD titles in August 2022, 12 used to be on Netflix and have migrated to other services. With so many studios opting to simply launch their own streaming service instead of licensing their content to others, fragmentation has increased exponentially. Instead of going to one service to watch bigtime shows like “Friends” or “The Office,” customers now have to search around and stack subscription services if they want access to all of their favorites.

The Ampere study wasn’t all bad news for Netflix, however. Original shows, continued to be a powerful asset for Netflix as the streaming giant’s home-grown series drove four times the demand of originals from the service’s competitors in 2022. A Netflix original title has been named the top show among all SVOD titles for six of the first eight months of 2022, and Netflix originals make up 38% of the company’s shows in the top 100.

That’s a big jump from 2015, when only 5% of Netflix shows in the top 100 were originals. The popularity of Netflix originals will continue to be a major asset to the company moving forward, as well. Because there are fewer and fewer franchises and established intellectual property available to capitalize on, streaming companies will have to beef up their original programming to ensure they have the stickiest content library possible.