(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.)
How about this…I’m getting my U.S. paid streaming subscriber estimates for Q2 of 2023 out before Q3 ends! That has not happened a lot recently. The last edition, covering the Q2 numbers, for example, came out in July.
I wait until all the “earnings reports” come out to have the freshest numbers, so this report will always have a two-month delay, but at least it came out before the next earnings season started… (This is also my goal going forward, depending on how busy things get.)
As a reminder…
- I estimate paid subscribers for every streamer (with over 5 million subscribers), even the ones that disclose nothing, like Amazon and Apple.
- My goal is to estimate the number of “paid” subscribers per streamer. If a streamer offers their service in a bundle—Amazon Prime, for example—I imagine a world where Prime Video stood on its own. How many folks would pay for that service?
- These are not the current subscriber totals for the streamers, but how many subscribers each streamer had as of the end June (or “Q2 of 2023”). My primary source is official subscriber estimates from the streamers’ quarterly reports, which I then use to make my own, bespoke estimates.
- This is a “U.S.”-only look. Someday that will change, as more streamers catch up (and we get better visibility into Apple and Amazon globally), but for now it’s just America.
The Overall Charts
Without further ado, here’s the data you came for:
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to read…
- My current estimates for each major streamer’s U.S. paid subscribers.
- A timeline of my estimates for every streamer’s subscriber counts going back to 2019.
- My confidence intervals for each streamer’s estimate.
- Links to every past estimate I’ve made.
…please subscribe. We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
