(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)
Okay, time for the tenth and final article in my ten-part series recapping 2025. As I wrote two articles ago, my barometer for whether these articles are worth writing/publishing is whether they yield strategic insights, and once again, every subsection in this article has a strategic takeaway (or two). Honestly, these are the most important takeaways, since I step back and look holistically at the streaming wars in 2025.
After I declare which streamers won and lost the year and which genres won and lost the year, I have six bonus thoughts.
If you’d like to review the whole series…
You can find the top films here.
ADVERTISEMENTThen I declared my winners and losers in various categories here.
You can find my 2024 recaps here.
And my 2022, 2021 and 2020 are all stored here.
Yeah, it’s halfway through the year, and I’m just finishing this series up now. This year, I tried to space things out to not clog up my writing calendar, plus I had to wait for Fallout to (finally) drop off the charts. Well, that ended up pushing this series wayyyyy too far back on the calendar. Oh well.
Next year, the goal will be to finish this series in March, but frankly, I just need more staff to make that happen. So please subscribe. Or, if you’re an advertiser (movie studio, FYC firm, or other), please reach out.
So, just last week, I wrote about how Netflix has lost seven of its top twelve scripted shows in the last year. And I shared two very dour looks at Netflix’s potential slowdown this year and last.
Guess what? They’re still the number one streamer in America.
In 2025, they dominated new streaming shows (even if most of those new hit shows aren’t coming back for future seasons), they had the two biggest films, and they had the top returning TV show by a mile.
The world is complicated, nuanced and messy. There may be warning signs of a future Netflix slowdown, but in 2025, Netflix was still the number one streamer.
Note what I didn’t say? That Netflix has “won” the streaming wars, because obviously the streaming wars are still ongoing and, more importantly, YouTube is still growing—so now YouTube has “won” the streaming wars?—while Netflix’s share of TV consumption has stalled out. Avoid simplistic talking points, especially if they’re constantly repeated and could fit on a bumper sticker.
I had trouble picking the second-place streamer this year, because all of the candidates for second place—Prime Video, HBO Max, and Paramount+—had some hits, but no one stood out.
Then I saw this update from Nielsen on the top shows on TV in the 2025-206 season. Sure enough, Netflix had five of the top ten shows! And they had ten of the top 31 shows and fifteen of the top fifty.
But CBS/Paramount+ actually had more shows in the top thirty and the top fifty. Paramount+/CBS had twelve of the top thirty shows and nineteen of the top fifty. Let me emphasize that: CBS/Paramount+ had more top shows in the 2025-2026 season than Netflix.
And this look was just for TV shows, not live sports, an arena Netflix barely plays in.
Meanwhile, Paramount-Skydance’s market cap is a fraction of Netflix’s. That’s weird, right?
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
…what streamer lost the year in TV…
…whether Netflix could win the title for “film” streamer too…
…who won the Disney vs Warner Bros. battle for theaters…
…what TV genres won and lost the year…
…what film genres won and lost the year…
…what film genre people think is thriving on streaming but isn’t…
…why F-BOSSS TV shows don’t hold the same sway in the 2020s…
…what it means to “flop” as a film on streaming…
…UK shows underperforming on streaming…
And a lot more…
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source entertainment.substack.com ’
