The Number of Streaming Titles Has Grown by 40% in 2 Years

And you thought you couldn’t keep up with streaming in the summer of 2021.

Over the past two years, the number of titles (movies and TV series) available across streaming services in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Germany, and Mexico has grown by about 40 percent, from roughly 1.7 million to nearly 2.4 million, according to Nielsen and Gracenote’s new “State of Play” study. The tally of titles on linear television — broadcast and cable — have actually more than doubled, though the overwhelming majority (almost 87 percent) of total unique titles reside on streaming services.

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In July 2021, broadcast, cable, and streaming combined for almost 1.9 million unique titles. As of June 2023, per the new study, there were a bit more than 2.7 million across all of the major delivery systems. This has created an even greater analysis paralysis: 20 percent of respondents reported not knowing what to watch on streaming and an inability to find something that suited them — so they “did something else instead.” God forbid it was going outside.

(It’s worth pointing out here that the vast, vast, vast majority of all of this content comes from the archives; “Peak TV” hasn’t blown up quite to that extent on its own.)

In March 2019, streaming audiences spent an average of seven minutes and 24 seconds finding something to watch. That soared to 11-minutes, 16-seconds in October 2022 before declining a bit (to 10:30) this June.

Still, plenty of us eventually streamed plenty of series and films. Last year, U.S. audiences streamed more than 19 years’ worth of content, per Nielsen. Don’t extrapolate that over the course of your lifetime — your brain may explode.

As we previously reported, July 2023 marked the very first time that linear-television viewership accounted for the minority of TV consumption. According to Nielsen’s monthly The Gauge study, broadcast (20.0 percent of total TV viewership) and cable (29.6 percent) combined for 49.6 percent of all television viewing last month. Streaming made up 38.7 percent, and the catch-all category “Other” came in at 11.6 percent. That one includes all other tuning (non-Nielsen-measured sources), unmeasured video on-demand (VOD), audio streaming, gaming, and other device (like DVD playback) use.

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