Growing time spent among active users is a consistent challenge for streaming services

Peacock’s enormous Olympics-driven increase in time spent last year is a major outlier. We project a slight dip for Peacock in 2025 as it loses some of its Olympics momentum, though its overall trajectory remains solidly upward. It will still land well ahead of its 2023 status, and the aforementioned NBA deal will lead to another boost (mostly in 2026). Besides the 2024 Peacock blip, positive and negative time spent growth rates consistently hover in the low single digits across every platform.

Netflix’s ad-supported users seem to be less engaged, and that’s constraining its time spent growth. Netflix’s strategy of rolling out a lower-cost ad-supported tier in conjunction with its password-sharing crackdown worked well on the business side as subscriptions and revenues increased. But the new cohort of ad-viewing subscribers appear to be watching less Netflix than higher-paying ad-free viewers. As a result, growth in average time spent among Netflix viewers went negative in 2024 and will stagnate this year.

Hulu’s decline seems at least partially strategic. Time spent with Hulu dropped across the population and among active users in 2024, and we project the same for 2025 and 2026. Disney’s rumored plan to combine all its properties into one app might be hurting Hulu’s short-term results. Hulu’s programming is increasingly available on Disney+, hinting at the parent company’s long-term intentions. If users watch Hulu-branded content via Disney+, that time no longer accrues to Hulu by our methodology, but it’s likely all the same from Disney’s point of view.

Read the rest of the report, US Time Spent With Sub OTT Streaming 2025.