This time last year, with Disney+ and Apple TV+ new on the market and HBO Max and Peacock gearing up to launch, all talk was of an imminent streaming war. Instead, 2020 turned into one big streaming win.
The benefit of lockdowns to streaming services has been well documented, but new analysis by The Wall Street Journal puts numbers on a striking fact: rather than competing for subscribers, all major streamers have grown in the pandemic.
In the U.S., the largest streaming services are expected to have finished 2020 with over 50% more combined subscribers than a year previously, according to the paper’s analysis of data from market-research firms MoffettNathanson LLC and HarrisX. Between Q4 2019 and Q4 2020, the number of subscriptions rose from 170.3 million to an estimated 256.7 million.