The ever-evolving streaming landscape has entered a new phase marked by more stable growth after years of battling volatility and churn, according to a new report from the data firm Antenna.
SVOD subscriptions in the U.S. grew by 11% from March 2024 to March 2025, according to Antenna’s research. That growth occurred pretty evenly across the premium SVOD offerings like Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, Disney+, Apple TV+, and HBO Max, as well as more specialty services.
Antenna expects SVOD subscriptions in the U.S. to keep growing, too. From Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, U.S. SVOD added 5M net subscribers, per the company’s research.
How many of these subscribers will stick around? According to Antenna, churn rates are actually slowing down considerably, as more than one in three people who cancel an SVOD service will resubscribe within the year.
Streaming has been quite a volatile marketplace, especially over the past several years as major players tried to find their footing. Acquisition numbers kept going up, but cancellations were increasing at an even more rapid pace as subscribers cycled through different streamers, rarely sticking with one for a significant period of time.
Antenna CEO Jonathan Carson says he suspects the industry is “getting right side up again” over the last several quarters as acquisition has begun to outpace the losses. Also, interestingly, Q4 2024 provided a pretty impressive 16M net adds by Antenna’s estimate, which also indicates that customers are settling into the streaming landscape.
“That is a very different narrative from what we’ve maybe heard out in the industry over the past couple of years,” Carson said in remarks Tuesday at a Prime Engage event with Amazon. “There was a lot of concern that maybe we weren’t finding our way to the profitable growth model in the industry. Going forward in streaming, we see something much more positive, better than expected.”
The average churn rate for the premium SVOD services has hovered right around 5% since January 2023, per Antenna. Unsurprisingly, the services with greater churn tend to be specialty platforms like Starz, whereas Netflix has consistently had the lowest churn rate, generally under 2%.
But it appears that the free and ad-supported tiers that are really driving streaming growth. In the first quarter of the year, ad-supported tiers accounted for 57% of gross adds on premium SVOD services. That’s pretty on par with last year, up nearly 15% from 2023.
Another area where many of the premium SVOD services are finding success is with third-party distributors, which all but Netflix have taken advantage of in some format. For example, Prime Video alone — which also offers in-app subscriptions for Starz, Paramount+, Apple TV+, BritBox, BET+, HBO Max and more — was responsible for about 24% of gross adds across all premium streaming services in Q1 2025.
That is a uniquely large capability to reach audiences that otherwise would likely not have subscribed to those services at all, Antenna posits.
The report found that, among some of the recently launched services, nine out of 10 sign-ups for other services that occurred within Prime Video would not have happened at all if the service wasn’t offered by Amazon, despite all of these brands having their own direct-to-consumer platform.
“Third-party distribution is now a very, very meaningful part of that more stable growth model,” Carson said.
Antenna’s reporting seems to be in line with the latest insights from Nielsen, which recently revealed that streaming usage surpassed the combined total broadcast and cable TV viewing for the first time in May. Nielsen says it expects that to be a temporary change, for now. Streaming, presumably, will continue to gain larger shares of the television landscape in the future, as both audiences and brands acclimate to this new environment.
