(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.)
Want to know the toughest data question I’ve been asked since I started writing about the streaming wars?
How many TV shows and movies do the streamers release every year?
It sounds really simple! Since I have a database of over 5,500 titles, I should be able to quickly spit out a number. But it’s surprisingly tough! Consider…
- Does this mean scripted TV shows or unscripted too?
- Should I include foreign titles or only US-produced?
- Do you care about returning shows or just new shows? What about shows that switch streamers? What about new library titles?
- For movies, do I count straight-to-streaming films, Pay 1 or licensed library movies?
- Which streamers do you mean? Do you include smaller streamers like Shudder? Or CrunchyRoll, which releases an astounding number of shows some weeks?
Suddenly, a simple question balloons into a complex data question, shot through with nuance. As you’ll see reading the rest of this article, multiple companies have different answers to this seemingly simple question.
I bring all this up because I think I might be right about one of my bigger calls of the last few years. In 2022, I wrote for the Ankler that I was worried about a few different bubbles popping in Hollywood, none more so than the content bubble. Here’s my quote:
“What if that frothy spending in Hollywood over the last decade, the budgets that funded that huge increase in the number of shows, comes to a screeching halt? Last year, Hollywood made more TV shows than ever before. And not by a little bit. The town added 349 series since 2009! A 166 percent increase! Not even the price of gas is going up that fast!
But, but, but…what if, instead of a glide path towards entertainment’s streaming nirvana, that chart represents a bubble that’s about to burst?”
Frankly, that bubble popped.
But it wasn’t just a streaming bubble; all of Hollywood is retracting.
Today, I’m going to show you a few different data sources that all show the same decline in content production by Hollywood. And not just one or two, but eight different data sources all come to the same, grim conclusion.
The Data Through the End of 2024 Was…Grim
Most data reports on content production naturally focus on the full calendar year. Thus, at the start of the new year, we tend to get a lot of reports on the state of production, so let’s start there.
Normally, this is where I’d trot out FX Research’s count of scripted shows by year. For years, they helped form the industry narrative, and even coined the term “peak TV era”, and in 2023, generated a lot of headlines when that bubble popped. Here’s their data:
Unfortunately, FX never provided us a number for 2024. I am really curious why FX’s John Landgraf didn’t update his chart, and honestly, I wonder if it’s because the news is too grim.
Fortunately, others have stepped into the gap.
Take Luminate, a data analyst like Nielsen that’s financially tied to the Penske Media empire. Their data differs from FX, since they include all shows, scripted and unscripted. Their annual report shows a decline going back to 2018, though not as precipitously:
In this case, the fall from the 2022 peak is about 23% and down 15% from 2018.
Ampere Analysis comes to a similar conclusion—looking at US data—showing the streaming bubble peak at 633 shows in 2021 and 2022, then declined to only 481 shows in 2023 and 433 last year:
Their global data tells the same story, with global orders about 75% of their streaming peak:
So that’s four different data sources, all showing the same thing: through the end of 2024, the number of new shows is down.
The hope, though, is that 2024 was still experiencing some of the 2023 production impacts of the strike. Hopefully, 2025 would represent a Hollywood at full strength…
Through the First Half of 2025, Production has NOT Rebounded
Since I cover every notable streaming film or show in my Streaming Ratings Report, I have a feel for how things are trending, whether I’m being swamped by new shows or have extra time when the number of new titles is light. Over the last two years, yeah, my workflow has gotten (somewhat) easier, with a notable decline in the number of shows, films and specials.
Since I track the number of new shows and films released each week—both scripted and unscripted, shows and films, English language and foreign—and have since the start of 2022, I can chart the decline. Here’s the data by week:
I love that look, but obviously it’s noisy. So I grouped it by quarter, and as you see, we haven’t seen a rebound in 2025 yet:
Here’s that look through the first half of each of the last four years:
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so 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 post about the Streaming Ratings Report, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
