MW Why spending on streaming services has stalled, even as subscriber numbers grow

By Lukas I. Alpert

Audiences are growing but it's mainly driven by viewers shifting from cable, not an actual expansion of the marketplace. Concerts and live sports, however, are going gangbusters.

Sabrina Carpenter pulled in $77.4 million while on tour in 2025, underscoring strong growth in revenue in recent years for live events like concerts and sports.

Every quarter, the major streaming platforms report considerable gains in their subscriber numbers. But that has largely been the result of viewers dumpling cable, not actual growth in the market, data show.

The real growth in recent years has been in live events - like concerts, movies and ballgames - to which consumers have been committing more of their extra dollars since the pandemic ended, according to an analysis by research firm MoffettNathanson.

"Many consumers are directing discretionary spend toward out-of-home experiences, with live entertainment and sports growing at an outsized pace relative to at-home counterparts," analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a note to clients.

This dynamic, he said, has shown up in stock prices, with live-event-focused companies like Live Nation $(LYV)$ and Cinemark $(CNK)$ outperforming the S&P 500 SPX this year. Most other media-related stocks, by comparison, have underperformed, he said.

Data show that overall consumer spending on video entertainment - which includes streaming services and cable TV - grew very slightly between 2019 and 2025, from $140 billion to $144 billion.

That adds up to a compounded annual growth rate of just 0.4% since 2019, Fishman wrote. When inflation is factored in, he says that figure drops to negative-3%.

In recent years, growth in the number of subscribers to streaming services has slowed, representing largely a shift-over of consumers who were dropping cable. But the pace of cord cutting has also slowed down in recent quarters, Fishman noted.

Meanwhile, consumer spending on events outside of the home has gone in the opposite direction. In the past two years, spending on live events, excluding spectator sports, has shot up by $10 billion to a total of $60 billion. Spending on sporting events grew by $7 billion in the same period, Fishman wrote.

Part of this is accounted for by changing consumer habits since the pandemic as people are have spent progressively less time at home and returned to life outside. Recent years have also seen some of the largest-grossing tours of all time, most notably Taylor Swift's record-setting "Eras Tour," which brought in over $2 billion in ticket sales.

At the same time, live events seem to have stayed steady despite a prolonged period of reduced consumer sentiment, during which media companies typically get hammered as customers seek to rein in spending.

One other area where trends are offsetting the slowing growth of the video market is advertising, which has been shifting from traditional television to streaming. If factored in as a kind of consumer spending, revenue from video has a compounded annual growth rate of something more like 1.4% since 2019 and is expected to drive growth to 3.3% over the next two years, Fishman said.

Some of what has impacted the unimpressive growth of the addressable audience for home entertainment has been the instability of the market. Consumers are still in the midst of a tectonic shift in viewing habits, which has left things extremely fragmented in terms of product choice and pricing.

Fishman said he expects that instability to continue until streaming services and their linear counterparts move more aggressively toward cooperating on bundling services, rather than leaving it up to consumers to pick and choose on a micro level as has become customary in recent years.

"Until that dynamic shifts," he wrote, "a return to bundling - which may ultimately be necessary to reignite growth in total consumer video spend - seems unlikely in the near term."

-Lukas I. Alpert

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 30, 2026 11:55 ET (15:55 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.