Fall has become peak streaming season
Fall has become peak streaming season
New data from Antenna highlights how streaming services have made the autumn months their own.
In the bygone days before streaming, viewers could reliably expect the best TV releases of the year to come during the autumn months. Cooler weather was seen by programmers as an opportunity to park people on their couches in front of the set. Streaming, however, has shaken up that status quo; streaming services need to keep people subscribed, so they release new titles year-round, upending the traditional TV seasonality. But new data from Antenna indicates that streamers haven’t abandoned the fall — in fact, the season remains peak streaming season, despite streamers’ willingness to release top titles at any time of year.
Key Details:
- Welcome aboard: Antenna’s data shows that 40% of gross streaming subscriber adds are at the end of the year.
- Accepting ads: A growing percentage of gross streaming additions are on ad plans.
- Following football: The NFL’s increasing presence on streamers is helping these services own the autumn.
Antenna’s data shows that between 2023 and 2025, around 40% of gross streaming additions in each year happened during the fall and winter. In each of those years, the final three-month period outpaced the other quarters in streaming subscriber acquisitions.
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In 2025, Antenna observed that seven of the top eight premium subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services recorded the most acquisitions during the final four months of the year. Average daily sign-ups were 33% higher during the fall season than the rest of the year.
Logically, sports streamers like ESPN Unlimited see a big spike in sign-ups during the fall season, when football, basketball, hockey, and other major sports kick off. Antenna’s numbers show that sports streamers see a 90% jump in average daily sign-ups during the fall months, the largest increase in any category.
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Customers are still showing a willingness to accept ads as they sign up for new streamers. Antenna’s data shows that between September and December 2025, 52% of streaming sign-ups were for ad-supported plans. Average monthly gross additions to ad-supported streaming tiers more than doubled from 2023 to 2025, to 8.8 million.
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The addition of NFL games to on-demand streaming services has clearly helped drive new subscribers to these platforms during the fall months. In 2026 alone, Netflix, Peacock, and Prime Video will all host exclusive NFL contests, and Paramount+ streams live NFL games airing on CBS in local markets.
Streaming has done away with traditional TV seasonality, but it’s certainly not discarding fall. The autumn months are the best time of year for subscriber acquisition, thanks in large part to football and the access many on-demand streamers provide to next-day streams of primetime programming from broadcast TV channels.
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