The State of Streaming in 2022 – A special report

While each year of the 2020s has brought major transformation for the ever-changing streaming landscape, 2022 has been perhaps the most transformative yet.

Just ask Netflix. The once untouchable, high-flying king of the streaming sector has found itself on the ropes and embracing changes it resisted for years: cracking down on password sharing, running ads, curtailing the growth of its content spending.

Meanwhile, the streamer’s historic subscriber loss and stock correction in April were a wake-up call for the entire media industry, a jarring affirmation that the perpetual growth they had been chasing with their streaming platforms was never going to be sustainable.

It was a wake-up call, too, for Wall Street, as investors who had hyped Netflix on the strength of its subscriber totals faced the uncomfortable reality that they had been looking at streaming through the wrong lens for years. Now, a new wisdom is taking hold in the maturing streaming space: At some point, this business will have to be a profitable one.

As such, 2022 was also the year that worsening economic conditions began to push the peak TV era toward a definitive close, that SVOD and AVOD became more intertwined than ever as Netflix and Disney+ entered the ad market and that a significant slowdown in domestic subscriber additions shook the industry. This year has reshaped the direct-to-consumer business in major ways, and the ripple effects are still being felt.

In light of all that change, Variety Intelligence Platform has transformed its SVOD-centric special report “Dare to Stream,” which was first published in 2019. In contrast to previous editions, which analyzed each of the major U.S.-based SVOD players in turn, the sixth iteration of this report focuses on the overarching issues facing the entire streaming space.

Among those are the ongoing tug-of-war between direct-to-consumer and linear TV; the streaming ad market, which is poised for explosive growth in the years ahead; and content trends, which reflect a growing diversity in streaming programming as SVODs embrace live sports and other formats.

The report also dives deep into metrics that should be top of mind as investors shift their focus away from subscriber growth, including revenue per user, viewing time and consumer churn.

Featuring exclusive statistics and the most charts we’ve ever compiled into one report, “Dare to Stream” offers readers data-driven analysis of where the streaming sector sits today, where it’s headed and what the implications are for the major players in the next phase of the streaming wars.

If anything is certain in this business, it’s that the transformation and upheaval are going to continue. Variety