Streaming Wars • July 2023

Amazon Eyes #2 Spot for First Time Ever

Meanwhile, Hijack is another beloved Top 20 entry for Apple TV+. Is it enough to make the streamer competitive?

As the strikes in Hollywood freeze work on new projects, competition in the Streaming Wars has begun to heat up. Some things aren’t likely to change any time soon: Netflix had close to a quarter of all Engagement in July, and the #1 show Wednesday put a considerable gap between itself and longtime competitor The Last of Us. But while the top spots for both series and platforms are spoken for, a very competitive July indicated that nearly everything behind them is fair game.

Hulu went a second straight month without a single show in the Top 20, and this dearth of successful new content is beginning to show in its standing on the platform leaderboards. Having been the #2 streamer since we started covering the Streaming Wars, Hulu is just 2.3% away from Amazon Prime Video, which overtook Max in July to be the #3 most Watchworthy platform in July. Meanwhile, Disney+’s total share of Engagement is just a hair smaller than Paramount+’s, which is itself going a second week without a show on the Top 20 — a strong showing from Ahsoka could help Disney+ rise one or even two spots. Finally, Apple TV+ continues to demonstrate its talent for producing hit shows, but its catalog still lacks depth, keeping it from competing with other new streamers.

Hijack Joins Shrinking and Silo on the Leaderboards — But Apple TV+ Won’t Budge

Hijack, the new thriller series starring Idris Elba, is a hit with Watchworthy users, debuting at #18 with a sentiment score (the ratio of Likes, Loves, and Favorites a show has to its Dislikes) of 97%. That’s the highest rating users have given a premiering show since The Terminal List got the same sentiment score in July of last year. Hijack makes three shows from Apple TV+ on the leaderboards last month, more than all but Max and Netflix, and those three shows have an average sentiment score of 96%. Yet Apple hasn’t moved from its #8 spot on the platform leaderboards this year. What’s holding it back?

The platform leaderboards are weighted in favor of streamers with lots and lots of content — the more shows you have, the more opportunities to get Engagement. Apple is building its own content library from scratch without the kind of trove of intellectual property accessible to competitors like Paramount+, Disney+, and Peacock. Clearly Apple is succeeding in its aim of developing popular original shows, but it may still be some time yet before it creates enough to compete with Streaming Wars titans.  

Amazon Closes in on Second Place as Hulu Goes Another Month Without a Top 20 Show

Amazon has swapped spots with Max a few times in 2023, but now it’s coming close to overtaking Hulu. How has this platform that’s struggled to produce new hits in the past suddenly come so close to an unprecedented Streaming Wars coup?

The answer is, in large part, due to the popularity of The Summer I Turned Pretty, which may not qualify for our leaderboards since it premiered over a year ago, but still garnered more Engagement than any other show in July by a wide margin. That show was helped by Jury Duty, which has had a surprisingly steady rise up the Top 20 in the months following its premiere. Neither of these shows are guaranteed to continue their upward trajectory in August, and strong showings from returning hits Reservation Dogs and Only Murders in the Building could put Hulu on stronger footing. A little bit of luck, however, would be enough to push Amazon over the edge into its first-ever second-place finish.

Peacock, Disney+, and Paramount+ Are Neck and Neck and Neck

As far as the Top 20 goes, the news was almost all bad for Peacock, Paramount+, and Disney+, the holders of the #5, #6, and #7 spots, respectively, since April. Peacock’s Based on a True Story failed to make forward progress, and its 2023 hit Poker Face fell seven spots, despite the latter show having the second largest number of Watchlist adds behind only Wednesday. Paramount+ went a second month without a show on the Top 20, while Disney+’s Secret Invasion failed to crawl onto the leaderboards the month of its finale. But all three streamers are within less than half a percentage point of one another. Will any one of them overtake the others?

There’s no overt sign that any of these streamers are set to make major gains except for Disney+, whose upcoming Ahsoka aspires to the same kind of popularity enjoyed by The Mandalorian, of which Ahsoka is a spinoff. A big debut from that series might be enough to reverse the streamer’s dwindling fortunes and put it back behind the Big 4 in August.

Velma, That ‘90s Show Prove You Don’t Need to Be Well-Liked to Be Watchworthy

In June, That ’90s Show climbed into the Top 5, despite having a sentiment score only slightly higher than 50%. In July, the show rose two spots to #3, while its sentiment score improved by only 5 percentage points. Even more surprising was Velma, the adult Scooby-Doo adaptation that sat at #21 in July with a sentiment score of 37%.

How are these shows getting so much Engagement despite low ratings from viewers? It’s partially because Dislikes contribute to overall Engagement, meaning these shows are in many cases “hate watches” for Watchworthy users. But it’s also because they are still getting enough interest from users, who are consistently searching for these programs and adding them to Watchlists. It’s not a totally unprecedented phenomenon: Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story has been on the Top 20 for all except two months since debuting in October 2022, but its sentiment score once dipped as low as 55% in April. Last month it had a much more comfortable score of 74%, though it barely beat out Velma for the #20 spot.

Our Methodology

In 30 seconds, our Watchworthy recommendation app learns your taste in TV and gives every show a “Worthy Score” specifically for you: the higher a given show’s Worthy Score, the more likely it is you will enjoy that show. Each month we track user engagement across thousands of series for every major streaming service. All of these signals are combined into a single metric called Watchworthy Engagement. This enables Ranker to determine which service’s content has the highest engagement — in other words, the streaming platforms who are winning the Streaming Wars.

The Top 20 shows measures which new series (premiered two years ago or later) are garnering the most Engagement from our users month to month. The most Watchworthy platform measures Engagement across all TV shows, new and old, and aggregates them according to the platform they stream on.

Want to learn more about how we built a TV recommendation engine using Ranker Insights data? We tell the whole story in our Watchworthy white paper, which you can download here for free.

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