Q3 2020 Video Streaming Report

Before officially closing the book on Q3 this year, the team at Reelgood decided to dig into the data to see how the popularity of some of the biggest SVoD platforms have changed over the past six months, as well as how streaming trends have transformed.

For the first chart, they looked at what the top five SVoD platforms are for Q3 based on their share of streams among 2M Reelgood users in the U.S. Data from the past quarter was included to serve as a point of comparison.

Netflix continues to dominate, although its share of streams this quarter dropped by 7 share points compared to Q2. Prime Video remains in second place with a 21% share of streams, and Hulu still sits on the third spot with 15%. Rounding out the list, HBO Max has managed to outpace Disney+ this quarter with 50% more initiated streams via Reelgood.

HBO Max’s seemingly massive gains in streaming share this quarter is due, in part, to the fact that it got a late start in Q2 (launched May 27). Another factor is how several HBO Max movies and TV shows ranked consistently on Reelgood’s monthly most-watched lists from July to September such as Joker, Birds of Prey, The Matrix, An American Pickle, Game of Thrones, Raised by Wolves, Rick and Morty, and more.

While Peacock Premium did not have a big enough piece of the pie to make it to the top five SVoD platforms this quarter, it’s worth noting that its free, ad-supported counterpart is doing quite well with roughly 16x the amount of streaming activity compared to the paid tier.

Finally, for the next chart, the team analyzed streaming share by service type (SVoD, AVoD, TVoD, TVE) for Q2 and Q3 of 2020.

This quarter — SVoD as a whole went down by 4.8 points in streaming activity compared to Q2, AVoD is up by 5.8 share points, and initiated streams for TVoD jumped up 2.4 points.

The increase in TVoD streaming in Q3 makes sense in light of several high-profile releases such as Bill & Ted Face The Music, Mulan, Ava, and Antebellum — all of which consumers were more than happy to spend their money on, based on how each one has topped various VoD charts at one point or another.

Additionally, it’s important to note that AVoD growth in the third quarter is driven in part by the recent addition of Peacock Free, Pluto TV, and Plex to Reelgood’s platforms. In fact, 25.3% of said quarter’s overall initiated streams for AVoD can be attributed to all three services combined, with 58% contributed by Peacock Free.

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