Which Streaming Services Offer Most Quality For Your Money?

One of the fiercest debates that has raged behind the scenes at many streaming services is whether to take a quality-first or quantity-first approach. The former has worked reasonably well for Apple TV+, while free streamers like Tubi find success in the latter strategy. Now, data compiled and analyzed by the television data company Reelgood shows which services are offering subscribers the most quality content for their money.

• Reelgood examined the libraries of eight top streaming services to determine which had the best quality titles.
• The data included all TV shows with an audience rating of 7.5 or higher on IMDb, as well as all movies with a score of 8.0 or higher.
• The numbers show conclusively that Max, Netflix, and Prime Video offer the most bang for the viewer’s buck when it comes to high-quality titles.

Which Streaming Services Have the Most Content?

Reelgood’s exhaustive research shows that in terms of sheer quantity, Netflix and Hulu rule the TV world. Both streamers have over 2,500 TV shows available, and both offer a higher raw number of quality TV shows than any other. Max is another leader in quality TV, which should hardly be a surprise considering it’s the repository for HBO programming. With 199 high-quality TV shows (series with an 8.0 audience rating or higher on IMDb), around 14% of Max’s library is high-quality series, about the same percentage that Netflix has and a higher percentage point than Hulu.

High-quality movies get a bit of a lower threshold, requiring an audience score of 7.5 or higher on IMDb to be labeled thus by Reelgood. But its data shows that Apple TV+, Disney+, Max, Hulu, and Paramount+ can all claim their movie libraries are at least 10% high-quality titles. Prime Video, the streamer with the most movies by far in the data, can only claim a high-quality movie rate of 3%.

The data shows that many of the top streaming services have a good selection of top-quality shows and movies for fans to enjoy, so lovers of quality can’t really go wrong picking between them from that standpoint. But with the cost of streaming continuing to climb, it’s important to know which of these services combines quality with an affordable price point the best.

Which Streaming Services Offer Quality Content on the Cheap?

Reelgood’s analysis compares the quality of shows in these streaming libraries to the cost of their respective ad-free plans. The data shows that in terms of the sheer volume of quality shows per dollar, it’s Prime Video (currently $8.99 to stream without ads), Hulu ($17.99), Netflix ($15.49), and Max ($15.99) leading the way. Prime Video and Hulu have more titles overall, which dilutes their quality-per-dollar a bit, but there’s no denying there are some great watches on both platforms.

Prime Video doesn’t perform as well in the quality-movies-per-dollar metric, and here too the number of titles available overall hurts its ratio. It’s still a leader in this category, however, with Max and Netflix standing out as the other streaming services that offer the most top-quality films. Don’t forget about Apple TV+ in this metric, though; it delivers just eight movies per dollar, but fully 25% of those are high quality according to Reelgood’s measurement.

The discussion about quality over quantity stems from the bigger conversation of how to keep streaming customers engaged best. Overwhelming subscribers with a ponderous catalog is clearly not the way to go, as surveys regarding the difficulty of discovering new, desirable content show. But high quality usually means that providers have to spend high amounts to get that title produced, and it’s easier said than done to create a show or movie that audiences think of as remarkably better than its contemporaries.

That’s why Reelgood’s data is so invaluable to streaming customers who are looking for the best value when it comes to quality. The numbers show conclusively that Max, Netflix, and Prime Video are consistent leaders in offering high-quality shows and movies, but that every streaming platform has at least a decent-sized collection of more prestigious titles.